


The Assistant

by angelaiswriting (carolinemoore)



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Angst, Dark Past, Death, F/M, Fist Fights, Illegal Activities, Implied Sexual Content, Invasion of Privacy, Manipulation, Mentions of Death, Mentions of Drug Traffic, Mentions of Human Traffic, Mentions of Murder, Mentions of Sex as Blackmail, Mentions of Violence, Mentions of Weapon Traffic, Mild Language, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Russian Mafia, Sexual innuendos, Slow Burn, Talk of murder, Trust Issues, Ukrainian Mafia, Violence, mafia, mentions of torture
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-10
Updated: 2019-07-22
Packaged: 2020-01-10 23:12:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 42,996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18417848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carolinemoore/pseuds/angelaiswriting
Summary: Y/N–hacker, big mouth, even bigger attitude–is the new addition to Fisk’s team. Sent to help the Ranskahovs, she immediately gets on Vladimir’s nerves. But as time passes, they start to take a liking to each other, even if none of them is willing to admit their feelings. Yet.[Requested on my tumblr, angelaiswriting.tumblr.com]





	1. Rules

**Author's Note:**

> I'm slowly posting this story on here, too :)  
> [You can find my Tumblr Masterlist here: http://angelaiswriting.tumblr.com/post/161364965353/masterlist]

 

  

 

Underground fights had always fascinated Vladimir Ranskahov, even when he was a kid back in Moscow. Part of the reason was that they were illegal, but there was also something else, some sort of aftertaste that lingered in his mouth even when he’d go home and lay in bed. They made his body buzz with unleashed energy and if that couldn’t be considered his drug, he really didn’t know what else could.

He had always been a regular, even in his hectic first weeks in New York: he had had to start from scratch, but he had managed to make himself a name. He was strong, he never lost; he was like Ivan Drago, with the only difference that there was no Rocky that could beat him, not if he sparred with Tolik.

It had been a long day at work and he was glad he had managed to find the time to escape into the fighting underworld. There was something there, something that lingered in the air and mingled with the smell of sweat and blood, that took all his worries and threw them out of the window. It was relaxing, almost rejuvenating. It kept his mind busy and his body ready for every eventuality–and, hopefully, smashing Fisk’s bootlicker face in would be one of those eventualities.

If it hadn’t been for his brother, who had dragged him away from places like that years ago, he would still be fighting. Obviously, there was no need for Anatoly to know he still hung out at such places: he would pointlessly worry and he would take Vladimir’s only pastime right out of his grasp. It didn’t matter he loved and cared for Tolya, he was not going to give up on this, for he needed it–he needed it more than vodka and sex and cigarettes, more than money and probably more than air. It had also been one of the only ways he’d managed to survive  _back there_ –rule number one: avoid  _its_ name–and he was not ready to let fighting go–rule number two: always be ready for history to repeat itself.

So, as he walked through the crowded space, he lit himself a cigarette with a smile on his face. He didn’t smile often, but this life… Oh,  _this life!_  It brought him back home, where he and others had used to fight like rats–rarely to the death, most often to first blood.

Oh, boy. Oh, fuck. He could feel it: the adrenaline starting to kick in, sending his brain in override. He almost didn’t feel the smoke of the cigarette as it sank down in his lungs and then made its way back up and out of his nostrils, like a bull in a cartoon.

 _Jesus fucking Christ_.

He didn’t even feel people bumping into and shoving him as they tried to reach the makeshift ring in the middle of the place. It was like floating in the air, like being a kid on Christmas day–he had never felt that way on Christmas day, but he thought that was how he’s feel had he had the right family.

The vibrations of his phone buzzing in the rear pocket of his suit pants didn’t even make its way to his brain, for Vladimir’s eyes had already zoomed in on the fight going on before him. It had to either be to death or knockout, for first blood had already been drawn and the fighters didn’t seem to be willing to stop.

Blood rushed to his fingers and it almost felt like being there, throwing punches and dodging hooks. The muscles in his back almost spasmed and even though the movements were imperceptible, the sensations were real: he was back in Moscow and he was seventeen. He had been foolish enough to challenge someone twice his age just because the guy had called him ‘a snotty kid’–which he had never been, for he had never had the time nor the chance to be a kid, let alone be snotty. So, he had thrown in his metaphorical glove and had been lucky enough, for the other one–Moscow’s underworld champion–had picked the challenge up.

He had been an idiot and Anatoly had kept on reminding him for months after the fight. That night he had come home with a purple face, a half-closed eye, a split lip, a pulsing eyebrow, a bloody mouth, but  _holy fucking fuck_ , he had got out victorious from the fight. He had been on edge for days after that and he had never been called a ‘snotty kid’ again. Nothing had ever made him feel higher than the knowledge that he had accidentally beaten Moscow’s biggest moron.

Therefore, watching the two sparring men in front of him made him feel at home. If he focused enough, he could even erase the English voices and shouts and replace them with Russian profanities, just like that night.

His phone started to buzz again and this time he felt it against his buttcheek, but still chose to ignore it. This was his safe heaven and he wasn’t going to let business or any other thing slip into it unwelcome.

Just as the vibrations stopped, the bigger guy fell to the floor, unconscious, blood slowly dripping out of his nose like a fat, red worm. The winner, a taller but thinner red-haired guy, spat blood and a tooth to the floor and with a scream, raised both his fists to the ceiling and planted a foot on the looser’s stomach. Then, in his victory- and adrenaline-induced rage, he spotted Vladimir. That fucking well-dressed son of a bitch was staring at him and his sight seemed to zoom in on the blonde’s scarred face like in a movie. He decided he didn’t like that guy’s smirk, nor the forgotten cigarette hanging from one corner of his mouth, dusting ashes to the ground.

_This was no place for rich motherfuckers._

He kicked the other man’s side with his boot and the man groaned. He groaned even more when a couple of viewers dragged him away from the center of the room: still half-unconscious, he weighed like a truck as his feet dragged themselves on the floor.

The ginger spat again and took a step forward, pointing at Vladimir with an accusing finger. “You, dick,” he half-yelled: his voice sounded as broken as his split front tooth. “What are you staring at, motherfucker?”

Vladimir’s hands had a will of their own as they tightened into fists and he had to unclench his crossed arms. His cigarette trembled between his lips before falling to the ground. He stepped on it, slamming his foot in an angry attempt to put it out.

“What did you call me?” He had to fight against his brain, for it had been ready to switch back to Russian. And he sure as hell didn’t want that carrot top to use Russian as an excuse to get out alive from that place.

The other spat blood and saliva to Vladimir’s feet–he didn’t know if that was a tic or a way to insult him, but he didn’t care. “This place is not for people like you.”

‘People like him’. Vladimir burst out laughing. What did that even mean? That it wasn’t for mafiosi? Or former fighters? Human traffickers? Drug traffickers?  _Killers_? He’d put that man’s victory to shame just by using his pinky finger. He laughed again.

“To the death.” The gingerhead raised his chin in a derogatory gesture before picking his guard back up.

Rule number three: never back off of a fight.

Vladimir smirked. “I am not sure you want to leave world so soon.” His accent was as thick as the blood splattered on the floor, but at that moment he didn’t care. Hand-to-hand spoke only one language and it was that of blood and the last time he checked, Russians and Americans bled the same. Nonetheless, he still took off his suit jacket, carefully folded it and laid it on the ground before he let his phone fall on it.

“I don’t die,” the other snickered, throwing a couple of punches through the air to show off. “No rules, just what plain death can say.”

Volodya nodded as he grabbed his gun. It was a comfortable weight in his hands–cold, but nonetheless still alive, still blood-thirsty. He checked the number of bullets–just to show off–, took the safety off, aimed and smirked before he put the safety back on and the gun back in its holster. He wasn’t planning on using it, but ‘no rules’ meant ‘no rules’ and if that brat thought he could win dirty… well, Vladimir had grown up playing dirty, so he’d show him was real shit looked like.

“C’mon, what are you waiting for?” His opponent was bouncing his weight from one foot to the other, his fists high up in front of his face. He was panting as he tried to intimidate Vladimir Ranskahov–had he known who that guy was, he had never picked up a fight with him. “Throwing in the towel, are we?”

Vladimir never took his gaze off the other’s smirk as he unbuttoned his sleeves and rolled them up his arms. The thin cotton seemed to be on the verge of bursting as it stretched on his biceps. Too bad no one there knew the meaning of his tattoos, on display under the neon lights hanging from the low ceiling.

 _Fools_ , he thought. Motherfucking fools that thought insulting and challenging people like him would end the day in a hospital bed and not on a stainless-steel table in a morgue.

He positioned himself before the red-haired guy, a couple of inches taller than him, but not as strong, not as quick, not as knowledgeable. His leg hurt from the fight with the bigger guy, an older bruise was perched on his shoulder and half of his face had turned yellow from an older fight. His fists were too wide apart, just like his feet, and his guard was too low. Vladimir would have managed to break his nose even with his eyes closed.

The opponent threw a punch, which Vladimir dodged. Then he threw another and another, left, right, left. Vladimir was dodging them all effortlessly, bouncing on his feet, getting out of the other’s way.

He was still waiting to make his move, checking the other’s weaknesses–or  _pretending_  to be doing that. He sat on a much higher level: that guy had made the mistake of challenging a shark when all he was, was a fish. His only luck was that today had been a great day for Vladimir: he and his brother had gotten their money, received a cargo of twelve women, and, better than anything else, there hadn’t been a meeting scheduled with Fisk’s bootlicker, Wesley. He felt like he could spare this one life.

But then the other started to insult him, calling him a weakling, a  _girl_ , and Vladimir didn’t see anything anymore. He had stopped being a person and had become pure rage–so big and furious it was indescribable. Its blood-thirst had become his own, its fury had become his fury, his blindness had become its sight. It had taken him three punches to knock out his challenger: one to his left cheek, the other to his stomach, the third had been a hook from below to his nose.

The ginger top had fallen to the ground like a sack of potatoes, unconscious, his nose broken. And just like that, he remembered the other’s words: ‘no rules’. For a moment he had been on the verge of using his gun: he was going to drill him with his bullets and then leave him on the ground until he bled to death. But he wasn’t going to use that upper hand, not even when he had been called a ‘dickless Russian scumbag’–had that guy seen his dick, he would have choked on his tongue.

He bent down above the opponent, contemplated snapping his neck broken, before bursting out in another laughter. “Tell him to come back to me when he’s grown into a man, I will kill him then,” he laughed, picking up his jacket and phone and making his way out of that place.

Hell’s Kitchen night traffic welcomed him when he came back into the world. It was like being re-born again: he felt new as the chilly air reached his lungs and a smile plastered itself on his lips. Vladimir Ranskahov stretched his neck from side to side, rolled back his shoulders and heaved a sigh.

What a great day to be alive!

He could feel himself half-hard from the fight and the adrenaline and grinned as he thought of going home, down a couple shots of vodka, hopping into the shower and jerk off–it was too good a day to worsen it with a whore. He couldn’t even feel the stinging sensation in his knuckles as he made his way to his car, sat inside and gripped the steering wheel with more force than it was needed.

Right then, his phone went off again on the passenger seat. A look at it and he groaned–Tolik. He ignored rule number four (never let anyone ruin your post-fight glow) and accepted the call.

“What?” he groaned, starting the car and getting out into the street. He put his phone on speaker, threw it back onto the passenger seat and lit himself a cigarette before rolling down the window to let the cool night air in.

Tolya swore under his breath. “Where the fuck were you? I’ve been calling you for hours, motherfucker!”

Volodya grinned, his eyes still veiled from the bliss that had overcome him after the fight. “Out, having fun.”

“Keep it in your pants next time. There was an emergency meeting back at the garage and you and your dick should’ve been there and not in some chick’s cunt.” His Russian ran fast on his tongue, it dripped anger from every word, shooting bullets at Vladimir’s fourth rule.

Boy, was his brother wrong! Vladimir laughed. “Jesus, brother, don’t ruin my mood,” he managed to say when all he wanted to do was groan like an animal. “Should have waited tomorrow morning.”

“Wesley wants to see us tomorrow, so you’d better be there. Sex can wait.”

“You should fuck more often, brother. When was the last time you banged someone? Your dick will dry out,” he laughed, his shoulders relaxing as his apartment complex came in sight.

Anatoly cussed him.

“Why an emergency meeting?” Vladimir asked, changing subject and parking in his lot. Sure, they had been having some problems lately, but nothing too big and definitely nothing Fisk should be worried about.

“Wesley will bring a chick.”

He snickered. “And? If he wants to fuck in front of us, I’m not against it. It might be his chance to show me he has a dick and is not ball-less.”

“It’s not  _his_  girl. Rumor has it she’s some hacker that works for him.”

There was silence as he walked up the stairs and into his apartment. Why did that matter? She could be a whore by profession and he would still be uninterested.

“Look, be there. I don’t want to end up in trouble just because my stupid brother ditched me. The weasel said not to mess things up and I don’t want to. I need you there tomorrow. You can do whatever you want after the meeting, but if you don’t want that girl to hack into our business and fuck us up, you’ll be there.”

“Yeah, fine.”

His mood was ruined, his half hard-on wasn’t hard anymore, and all he could feel was the pulsing pain in his knuckles. If there was something he knew for certain, that was Wesley’s and Tolik’s ability to fuck his mood any time they wanted.

And if that girl set her mind to fuck their business… She’d better start praying.


	2. Unpleasant News

Weirdly enough, the meeting was going to be held in a new location, one that had been kept a secret until an hour before its beginning. Commonly enough, though, the location was another building still in construction and owned by Fisk’s company, for he wanted to be sure to be on safe ground. No police, no complications. He wanted one clean operation so as to not blow up his cover.

It wasn’t going to happen anyway, the Ranskahov brothers reasoned. They cared about their money and their traffics and even though they weren’t exactly  _that_  excited to be working with Gao and the Yakuza, they weren’t going to complain. As long as money poured into their pockets, they were fine.

What they weren’t fine with, was a spy.

What had previously been a simple rumor had later turned out to be, in fact, the truth. The girl Wesley was going to bring along was a hacker–hence, in Vladimir and Anatoly’s dictionaries,  _a fucking_   _spy_.

Why did that girl have to be there, none of them had a clue. Was it because of the failed shipment two months ago? It couldn’t be: they had had three other meetings with Fisk’s man and the problem hadn’t been brought up. It hadn’t even been addressed because it hadn’t been their fault.

And yet, the real question was:  _where the fuck were the Asians?_  Their absence felt weird, a stinging aftertaste at the back of their throats. They had always been present because they were part of the deal and part of the business. They dealt with drugs and the Russians with weapons and human beings. They were symbionts: they worked together because they benefited from the others’ work.

Unless, of course, this was Fisk’s way of removing them from the chessboard. He acted like its king, he  _felt_  as though he was its king: what was going to stop him from killing off the Russian side of the traffic?

Vladimir gritted his teeth, the smoke of the cigarette finding its way out from his flaring nostrils. The fingers that held the cigarette trembled, but not in fear. He wasn’t at ease, he didn’t like to stand and wait in an unknown place, unaware of its emergency exits and hiding corners. Unlike his older brother, much more composed, he felt like a caged animal. He could smell the people on the other side of the bars, even though he could barely see them, and the more he waited, the more that cage shrank in size.

It was almost like being six again when he had been trapped in that damn elevator that never worked like it should have. He had grown up in an old building–old, and dark, and stinky. He saw shadows everywhere, even if he wanted to show a brave façade in front of his brother and father. After all,  _Vladimir Ranskahov was no pussy_. The truth was, though, that he had been  _terrified_  by that creepy junkie that lived down the corridor, or by the man that, two doors from his own, yelled at any given moment. And so, he never took the stairs. Hopping from one foot to the other, he always jumped into the elevator, forced its doors closed so as to not let anyone else inside, and punched the button that would bring him up to the sixth floor. It was always an endless ascent: that metal box smelled like cat piss and the neon light above his head flickered and threatened to switch off. He had felt a jerk, that day, and he had bumped his head against one of the four walls but hadn’t immediately realized what had happened. It had taken him a couple of minutes, for it was weird that the doors hadn’t opened yet. And so he had understood and pressed the button with the yellow bell, hoping and praying that someone would come.

It had almost been like being in a movie: the hot guy and the hot girl ended up in the same elevator, which would soon break, and they’d end up kissing and touching. But he was not a hot guy and there was no hot girl and he had felt an invisible fist squeezing the air out of his lungs, leaving him breathless as his mind worked at the speed of light.

It had been the longest four minutes of his life before the doors finally opened and the building’s technician welcomed him onto the corridor.

Even now, as he paced back and forth on the ugly and bare cement floor, inhaling the smoke of his cigarette as though it was pure-quality air, he felt confined inside the four walls of that elevator, locked in there like a sardine in its can.

He wasn’t good at this. The only thing he was capable of doing when he felt trapped was fighting. He fought with kicks and fists, he bared his teeth like a wild animal, he turned into the beast he had been back– _don’t go there_ –back  _there_. And it didn’t matter that that place was just that– _a place_ –nor that he tried his best to pretend it didn’t have a name, because deep down, in the deepest part of his mind, it still had– _Utkin_.

_Fuck, no._

“Where is that fucking doormat?” Those words were a canine growl at the base of his throat, burning with the fumes of his third cigarette in the last fifteen minutes. It scratched his throat with its dusty fingers, it knotted his stomach, it set his brain on fire, slamming it into survival mode.

Anatoly turned towards his brother, more concerned about his compulsive smoking than he was about Wesley’s tardiness. He didn’t like the guy, so he was happy he wasn’t there yet–his lateness also probably meant that the meeting would be cut short because, as he always loved to put it, “he was a busy man”.

He spat to the ground and wasn’t able to stop his head from shaking.  _Fucking rat_. How could someone really expect someone of his caliber to take orders from someone who couldn’t even clean his own ass? His fingernails split the flesh of his palms, but he was too busy worrying about his brother to even notice.

The night before Vladimir had come home late–and Anatoly knew that just because he had asked– _ordered_ –Petya to tail him. He had supposed he still hung out at illegal fights’ rings, but before that day it had only been just that,  _a supposition_. He thought… He had been foolish enough to believe that…

What do you do when you find out someone you love is still attracted by the wrong people like a magnet? He didn’t know, not anymore; probably he had never even known for sure. Not once did he delude himself into thinking he  _wasn’t_  one of ‘the wrong people’ because– _damn!_ –he was, and Vladimir was, too. But he and Paulina had tried to help him endless times–or, better, they had deluded themselves into thinking they could indeed help him, when all he knew was fighting and how to fight and how to win a fight–and they had always failed. Vladimir kept going back to his own special drug and while Tolya had believed he had stopped fighting, Piotr had proved his convictions wrong: Volodya fought and he fought well, he hadn’t lost his skills.

Faced with the news, he thought he had lost his brother.

And even now, as he stared at him, it felt like staring at a stranger. He couldn’t recognize his face, nor his ugly scar, nor his bruised knuckles. He sighed–he hadn’t meant to, so it had probably been his subconscious’ response to the terrible feeling of failure that threatened to drown him.

Right then, Vladimir turned, one eyebrow cocked into a questioning expression, and Anatoly couldn’t understand how he had managed to hear that sound above what he knew had to be the screams of his own thoughts. “I’m going to give the moron five minutes: if he’s not here by then, I’ll leave this fucking place and go home.”

“No Russian here, please.”

The brothers turned into the direction of the voice just to see Wesley walk into the open and half-built space, a young woman trailing behind him with an annoyed smirk on her face.

“No newbies here,” Anatoly retorted, mocking Wesley and throwing his own cigarette to the ground. “She can wait outside, whatever it is.”

“Unfortunately I fear this is not what my boss wants.” The man shrugged his shoulders, almost sorry he couldn’t fulfill Anatoly’s wish, and his words gave the girl the courage she needed to take a few steps forward, to better look at the brothers.

Vladimir groaned. He turned towards the city, visible through the missing windows, just as the night breeze slipped in, blowing the smoke of his cigarette in his face. His eyes closed on reflex even before his brain had the time to send out the order and the man inhaled deeply before reopening his eyes. “Make this quick, we don’t have whole night.” And, unable to help himself, he let a muttered ‘ _mudak_ ’ slip past his lips.

“This is Y/N.”

Anatoly greeted her with a curt nod of his head, his eyes scanning her whole form. It wasn’t just to take her in, but also to check if there was any visible trace of a weapon poking out from somewhere. Wesley had eventually put his mind at peace, for the Ranskahovs would never leave their guns at home when they went to one of his stupid meetings, but  _they_  weren’t going to accept some unknown newbie to be armed in their presence.

“She works for us,” Wesley went on. He had clearly expected some different kind of reaction from the brothers and had been disappointed by its lack.

“We don’t care who works for you,” Vladimir spat, finally turning around and letting his cigarette fall to the ground. “We have our men and your boss has his. We do not care.”

They both hated Fisk’s bootlicker, with his tiny eyes and rectangular glasses and his stupid hair brushed back. He was annoying, he believed himself important when all he was, was a doormat. What role did he have in Fisk’s business? He never got his hands dirty– _nor stained with blood_. He was just a pawn. And yet, he always presented himself with that stupid expression plastered all over his face, screaming  _slap the shit out of my eye sockets_.

_Dick._

“Well, actually…” Wesley’s smirk grew bigger. At its sight, Vlad felt his blood boil through his veins, turn into a furious stream, threatening to blind him. “She will be working with you from now on.”

For a second it was as though time had stopped and dilated. The brothers turned to stare at each other with silent questions passing through their brains and over their eyes, and Anatoly saw Vladimir’s fingers twitch in the attempt to not close his hands in fists. He then watched him swallow–slowly, almost painfully, saliva as thick as blood as it slid down his brother’s throat.

Then, when he least expected it, Vlad let out a cold, robotic laughter. Tolya had feared he’d take his gun and shoot James Wesley between his eyes, yet his reaction chilled him to the bone.

“We will not work with woman,” he declared, nodding in Y/N’s direction. She had been standing there, staring at him with her clever eyes shielded behind her pair of glasses, and he hated her examining stare, almost as though he was some weird animal that needed to be studied. The scar on his face, the one Utkin– _fuck_ –gifted him for his twenty-fifth birthday, burned almost as though he was back there and then, blood still spilling down his face like his mother’s tears. “We have all men we need. She would be useless.”

“Actually-” The girl had tried to speak, but Wesley stopped her with a wave of his hand.

“ _Our_  boss,” and he emphasized on the adjective, “was pretty disappointed by your failure, two months ago.”

“He should have spoken up as soon as it happened,” Anatoly cut in, taking a step towards his brother to stop him with his presence from doing anything stupid. “It has not happened ever since,” he smirked, breath coming out loud from his nostrils, head slightly tilting to one side. “How could this girl,” and he stared down at her, his gaze accusatory and mouth set in an annoyed sneer, “help?”

Vladimir chuckled and the sound somehow came out harsher than his previous laughter. It made Anatoly’s hair stand up on their ends and Wesley’s satisfied smirk fade. “Unless she’s good at sucking dick, she’s useless.”

“I know more than you do,” the girl cut in, too tired and annoyed by the Russians’ words. “And I will  _not_  trouble myself with your tiny dick, so you might as well find yourself someone else. Maybe you could even resort to your own hand.”

Vlad’s face contorted into a sneer, air coming out boiling and furious from his nose, hands wrapping up into fists. Anatoly had to hold him back, for he knew his brother would smash that girl’s head on the floor if he let him take another step forward.

“Come on, guys, come on.” Wesley had taken a step back, leaving Y/N alone on the front line. “This decision is unnegotiable. Y/N will come to your garage tomorrow morning and my boss expects to not hear one word from you,” he pointed to the Russians, “and not even you, Y/N. Work your problems out without killing each other and you might even earn a reward. She will check your clients, help you with commissions and business and if you let her do, a bigger portion of the business will be waiting for you.”

Anatoly nodded, forcing his brother to turn his back to Wesley and the girl. Unconcerned by the man’s first words upon meeting them that night, he switched to his native language. “I don’t want her with us either,” he confessed, grabbing Vladimir by his arm. “She could be sent to spy or God knows what else. But it’ll do us no good if she hacks into our shit and tells everything about our business to this dog or to their boss. Let’s play their game for a while and see how it goes.”

“It’ll all go to shit, brother!” Vladimir could hardly see straight. That fucking shipment had failed because the Asians had insisted on doing it their way and yet it was  _them_  that had to put up with a stupid babysitter. “Whatever she’s been sent here for is not to help us. Where’s Gao? Or the Japanese? This is a fucking trap and this stupid American and his boss only want to sack us, give our part of the deal to someone else and drop us somewhere on the bottom of the Atlantic.”

Toly turned to glance at the girl, who was staring at them both with an annoyed frown settled upon her otherwise sweet features. “Look at her, she looks just as annoyed as we are, though.” As Vladimir turned to make sure his brother’s words reflected the truth as his mirror welcomed him with the ugly reflection of his scar every morning, Anatoly continued with his reasoning. “If she really can hack into our shit, she wouldn’t be sent to work with us.”

“So what? You think she’s not a real hacker?”

Tolya grunted. “What I’m trying to say is, let’s wait and see. If anything goes wrong or is she tries to do something, we can still kill her.”

“Why don’t we do that now? Give me five minutes alone with her and no one will ever find her corpse.”

His brother was so stupid, Tolik thought. How couldn’t he see beyond his nose? Maybe he had left what little brain nature had given him back in Utkin, he reasoned, and that had to be the real reason behind his stupidity. “Why make her work with us if she can end us with her computer?”

Vlad peeked a glance at Y/N one last time before turning to stare at his brother. “Is Ivan sure she’s a hacker?”

Tolik nodded. “We can use her to know things about the people she works for, too.”

“I’m trusting you on this, brother,” Vladimir sighed, finally turning towards Wesley.

The man wasn’t just annoyed, he was  _pissed_  but, for once, he chose not to make any remarks about the men’s use of a language he did not understand. “Are you done?” he simply asked.

Anatoly nodded his by-now-throbbing head while his brother grimaced at the presence of the girl he was apparently forced to work with. “I want you at the garage tomorrow morning at five. We hate latecomers.”


	3. Here to Help or Here to Spy?

The lack of dreams had been a blessing that night. For how good a day Vladimir could have, it was always the often wakeful hours that separated dusk from dawn that tormented him, that ate him alive. At first, he had disguised his lack of sleep by working at night, when Tolya went home to his woman, but when his brother had started to ask questions, he had had to stop and step back behind his walls. He was safe there–he was actually  _not_ , but he wasn’t going to acknowledge the problem, either. His cage wasn’t silent–it truly wasn’t–but it was still better than the screams he’d hear at night.

The reason behind his running away from his own problems was that he despised weaknesses–and he did so even more when they were his own. As he had often repeated to his father, he was no pussy. It didn’t matter that he was all broken inside, now, and that it wasn’t his fault, for he still perceived it as a weakness and, therefore, as a failure. The whispers he heard and the touches he felt were a constant reminder of what he tried to avoid day in and day out with all his strength. Unlike Anatoly, though, he didn’t have anyone that could shield him from the shadows that hid inside his head.

But whenever a dreamless night graced him with its undeserved peace, he went back to feeling invincible. And  _alive_. It wasn’t quite like fighting– _nothing_  was like fighting, to be honest–but it was  _something_. Something he never dared hope for, but still, something he’d always cherish.

Those peace and sudden happiness were the reason behind the spring in his step as he closed the door of his apartment behind his back today. That night’s calmness, that had finally gifted him a few hours of rest and sleep, had completely erased the previous day’s unwelcome meeting with Wesley and, though unknowingly, he was content. It allowed him to take a deep breath and think of the day to come with a lighter heart.

However, it didn’t last long–it  _never_  lasted long. He had just gotten into his car and deleted the five missed calls from the garage he had received while asleep, when he opened his answering machine.

Aslan had left four messages and their tone went from confused to irritated–even if, as he listened to the last recording, Vlad knew all the guy had wanted to do had been yell at him. He smirked: for some reason he couldn’t quite name, it was always hilarious to see Aslan get mad.

He had half-forgotten about the woman Fisk had forced him and his brother to work with, though, and now she presented herself through his man’s words ready to shatter his newly found inner peace. And to have his day ruined was not something he liked, most of all because it usually ended with his night ruined, too. And that was way worse.

Slowly, the conversation held at the meeting came back to him, one slow word after the other.  _I want you at the garage tomorrow morning at five_ , he had ordered her the night before, just before storming out of the building Wesley had chosen for the occasion. He hadn’t thought much of it, back then, but now he found himself gritting his teeth in annoyance.

_We hate latecomers_ , he chuckled as he parked behind the Veles Taxi garage.

He hoped he had at least intimidated her a little, for the idea that he’d have to endure the presence of what could well be a spy in his home still annoyed him to no extent. Still, if they had to be coworkers, he needed to know she’d respect his working hours because none of them could afford to fuck anything up if they still wanted to have a roof above their heads and blood still flowing through their veins in a month’s time.

The will to try and bring back the peace that had welcomed him that morning, though, was stronger than any worries, so he did what he did best: he pushed his thoughts to the side and emptied his mind as much as he could. Squaring his shoulders, he glanced around to make sure that everything looked in order before stepping to the side to let the oncoming car pass. With a wave of his hand at Sergei, who was leaving the garage with his cab for his first ride of the day, he entered the building.

Curses were his only good morning that day–it made him smirk.

“You’re late, you moron!” Y/N complained, voice dangerously raising with each spat word.

“Who the fuck is this chick?” Aslan had made sure to avoid speaking in English: he truly didn’t want  _this chick_  to understand what he was saying, for he didn’t want to give her the chance and the excuse to start yelling again. He was tired: he had been last night’s shift supervisor and the last thing he’d have ever imagined to witness (nor  _wished_ to witness) was a stubborn girl demanding to see his bosses to ‘start working’. “Bitch says she’s working with us from now on,” he continued, his gaze wandering back to the girl sat at the reception desk. She didn’t look like a prostitute, nor like she had any criminal background that could come in handy for the business. “Should I have given her a car?” He was not sure he should have–she had, after all, taken a taxi to get there and she had a computer bag with her. She looked nothing like the drivers he had always worked with.

When he turned again, Vladimir noticed his features, contorted in an angry and disappointed grimace as his hands clutched at his car keys to speed back home for some rest before his next shift would start again in the afternoon. Aslan’s confusion had quickly dissolved and it had left him upset at the memory of the countless insults she had thrown his way without him having the chance to shut her up.

Vladimir’s only answer was a roll of the eyes at the beginning. He didn’t really want to talk about the new agreement he had unexpectedly found himself being forced to follow, most of all because he hadn’t even wanted to sign it in the first place.  _Anatoly_  should make the speech: he was the one who had convinced him to accept the new rules, therefore the dirty work had to be his responsibility. But then he remembered that they had agreed Toly would take a day off of work to celebrate his stupid anniversary with his woman and the realization that he had to deal with the spy–as he thought of her–on his own crushed him under its weight like a demolition ball.

There was no way he would manage to play along, he thought. No chance. Zero. He would have rather had to work with Wesley, for he knew Fisk’s servant had no chance against him. But this… this  _girl_. She was the embodiment of anything that could go wrong. There was a reason if he and Anatoly had always been the only ones doing the real office work: because he trusted no one, not even Anatoly’s woman, no matter how important she could be for his brother. He could accept Sergei, for he trusted him and loved him like a brother, but even then, he had to consider letting him help more than just thoroughly.

And this Y/N… He knew nothing about her: she could be a spy just as she could very well be a saint. It was a fifty-fifty chance of being wrong or right. Yet, he didn’t like the idea of taking such a big risk. That had probably been the mistake that had ended with him and Tolik in– _bozhe moy_ –Utkin in the first place. And now he sure as hell didn’t want history to repeat itself–he was already caged enough, he… he didn’t want the invisible four walls of his mind to become  _real_.

Yet, he should have probably come to work earlier to deliver the news to his men and told Y/N to come later. Just as it was hard for him to face the new reality of things, it would have probably been just as hard for his men–probably not for Piotr, though. No, the smug bastard was going to try to sneak into her panties, Vladimir was sure of this. But the only thought he had had on his mind last night had been his thirst for revenge against that new outrage thrown his way and he hadn’t exactly thought rationally. No one fooled themselves Vladimir Borisovich Ranskahov could be even  _remotely_  rational, but at the same time no one knew he always tried his best–it didn’t matter that his best efforts were often– _always_ –met with failures.

“No,” he groaned at Aslan’s questioning look. “She’s working in the office with me. We have a batch of new rules, it seems. When did she arrive?”

“At five. On the dot,” was the answer and Vladimir was pleased and surprised to learn she had followed the order he had given–that had been the last thing he thought she’d do. “Any chance we can hump her or is she yours?”

Vlad scoffed, a frown furrowing his eyebrows. “Not mine at all,”  _thank God_. “But she bites. Wouldn’t surprise me if she had teeth up her cunt.” He didn’t chuckle, but the intention was there, and Aslan, barely containing his laughter, still understood.

*

That day proved itself to be a slow day. Minutes stretched into hours and annoyance into something bigger. It was the deep breath before the jump; the last minute of peace before the storm, when the sun slowly but surely went to hide behind the clouds approaching like a galloping horse.

Vladimir had taken Y/N to his office, sat her down on the couch and started to check that everything was in order for the following week’s shipment. It wasn’t an important order, but he still cared about his job–and the  _quality_  of his job–so he treated every customer with the same care.

At first, he had thought of leaving the girl in his brother’s office, just to then realize that Anatoly probably wouldn’t like the idea of having a hacker among his stuff when he wasn’t there. He was  _not_  going to ring him a call, either, for he could only imagine how he was spending his free time with Paulina: Vlad had never been a cockblock and he surely didn’t want to turn into one right now.

His second thought had been that he, too, didn’t trust her–not that he was by any means interested into getting to know her and prove wrong the idea he had of her. So he had settled for a compromise: sit in his office with her, plug in his earphones and ignore her presence completely.

If anything, though, she had proved to at least be collaborative and he sure enjoyed that quality in a coworker–even in one he didn’t want to have anything to do with. His work and day-to-day life were already stressful enough and he didn’t want to have to babysit a grown-up woman. Therefore, her silence was a welcome guest as he revised his numbers, MC Doni making his foot lightly tap the floor at the rhythm of his Полегче.

He didn’t like to work with music hammering his eardrums, but it had been a stressful and chaotic past month that had ended up with him picking up his brother’s habit and stealing his iPod. Not that Vladimir was complaining about that subtle distraction, on the contrary.

Moreover, Anatoly still hadn’t found out about the theft–and hadn’t it been for the increased amount of time he had started to spend with Paulina, Vladimir would have found it weird, alarming even–so everything was fine.

“So, when are we starting to work?” Y/N’s voice suddenly covered the song in his ears and he was forced to raise his gaze from his laptop to her. “Any chance the answer’s gonna be ‘soon’?” She didn’t ask when he was going to show her around the place as she had planned to, though. She wanted to personally meet or at least  _see_  the people she was going to work with, to put a face to the things she knew about them, but as she stared at Vladimir’s profile, she accepted what she thought was the truth: everything was going to follow  _his_  rhythms, not hers.

He looked up and stared long and hard at her. The temptation to ask her if she was making fun of him or what she thought he was doing was strong, but he bit his tongue, swallowed his harsh remarks and grimaced. She was standing in front of the window, back resting against the glass and arms crossed right under her breast.

A smirk tugged at his lips and he didn’t even try to stop it. For how much her presence could annoy him, he was glad she was at least a good view at, bandaged in that suit of hers.

“I  _am_  working.” The roll of his eyes made her close her mouth.

It hadn’t simply been the look he had sent her way. There had also been that teeth-gritting jerk of muscle in his jaw, tugging at his cheek, that had seemed to say  _shut up or else_. And she really didn’t want to know what that ‘or else’ could mean, she didn’t want to know that the things Vladimir Ranskahov had done to his victims could happen to her, too. Wesley had promised nothing bad would happen to her, but… Could he guarantee for that?

The fear that Wesley and Fisk could throw her into the lions’ cage and abandon her there was probably the only reason why she let herself be shut up by him.

Silence stretched between the two like the growing distance between diverging galaxies. And while it fed Y/N’s annoyance, it put Vlad’s raging thoughts to rest, allowing his mind to go back to work.

But the more he tried to focus, the farther he got from succeeding.

Y/N’s foot was impatiently tapping against the ruined parquet of the first floor. He could see that movement from the corner of his right eye pretty well. And once he noticed it, there was no going back. It bugged him. It almost felt like it was thrumming in his temples, setting his nerves on fire.

“Stop that,” he ordered, pressing the pause button of Tolya’s old iPod.

She stopped the movement long enough for him to switch his attention back to his task at hand before resuming it.

Fighting a child would have probably been easier. “Stop,” he repeated with a grown as he picked up a pen to take some notes on a loose sheet of paper–he was going to lose it soon, but at the moment, it didn’t matter.

Without any sort of music in his ears, he could now hear the tapping of her foot on the floors and it got on his nerves.  _She_  got on his nerves more than she had even just upon his arrival at the garage.

It was an annoying tip-tapping that arrogantly distracted him from his paperwork. It brought him back there– _remember rule number one_ –and it reminded him of the stubborn pitter-patter that dropped down the humidity-soaked ceiling of his cell.

He had to resist the urge to take his gun and unload it into her foot. “What is it that you want?” he eventually asked instead, trying to go through every single bad consequence he’d have to live through if he truly decided to disobey Fisk. Hadn’t it been for the fact that such consequences would have reflected on Anatoly and his woman’s lives, he would have at least used one bullet. Just a little wound, so that Y/N could remember who was boss here and that she should do anything in her power not to piss him off.

“I want to know what I have to do. James said-”

“I don’t care,” Vladimir groaned. He didn’t give a single fuck about what Wesley had said, for that doormat was still alive for the same reason he hadn’t grabbed his gun a few minutes before. “Do what you have to do. I am busy.”

“We’re supposed to be working together,” she reminded him, stepping closer to his desk and planting her hands firmly on its surface. She was imposing herself too much into his personal space and he did not like that. “I’m sure you have enough brain to remember that if you let me do, you and your brother will get richer than you already are.”

Vladimir’s eyes gazed at the ceiling– _God, give me the strength_ –and he heaved a sigh. “I’m already doing my job. If you keep disturbing me, you won’t get part of deal your boss promised you.”

“You did a terrible job with that failed shipment. Stop being stubborn, I am here to help.”

“You are here to  _spy_.”

That was it. Now the truth was out in the open and he could kick her out of his office, his life  _and_ his business. He had lasted… what? Two hours in her company? A quick glance at the clock on his wrist revealed that, in fact, he had lasted less than two hours.

He needed Anatoly for this. He was good at this, whatever ‘this’ was. Vladimir… He hadn’t had to deal with people he didn’t like for a long time and he wasn’t able to put his personal likes and dislikes to the side, not anymore at least.

Working side by side with someone else just wasn’t how he worked. Sure, he did go through paperwork and order preparations with Anatoly, but that was his  _brother_ , not some stranger he knew nothing about and with whom he wanted to have nothing to do.

Hadn’t it been for his past, still haunting him, he would have never taken orders from some self-proclaimed kingpin dick. He hadn’t had the Russian capital on the palm of his hand just to fall so low he had to become someone else’s dog.

“Is this what worries you?”

Brought back to reality, Vladimir was almost confused to see that her reaction was more surprised than upset.

“Isn’t that why a hacker has been sent here?” He was so confident in his own beliefs that he didn’t even want to listen to her answer. He just couldn’t wait to finish all the preparatory work for that shipment and pass to the next.

But Y/N scoffed, her arms once again resuming their crossed position on her chest. “I could have spied on you from the comfort of my bathtub as I sipped on a margarita. Why come here to work with a dick when I could do much better without you?” she tried to reason, but he was too stubborn to even try and look at the facts from an unbiased perspective. Not that she had expected anything less. “I’m here to make Anatoly’s job and  _your_ job, too, a little more efficient and less time-consuming. And if you would kindly stop rolling your eyes, for you will not find a brain in there, I’d be immensely happy.”


	4. Hello, Neighbor

Anatoly’s return to work the day after his second anniversary had been met with a slightly tense atmosphere stinking the air in his brother’s office. He knew how stubborn Vladimir could get–heck, he had known even two days before when he had managed to convince him to accept the girl’s presence not to anger Fisk–but he was only now starting to understand how stubborn that same girl could be.

 _Definitely Vlad’s match_ , he thought as he sat down at his own desk in the peace and tranquillity of his office.

Had it been useful and not a waste of time and energies, he would have locked his brother and Fisk’s hacker in a room and thrown away the key so that they could either kill each other–not a bad solution at all–or calm down enough to finally be civil with each other–definitely a better ending than death, for he needed his brother and could have used a hacker for his business.

But those two were already in Vladimir’s office and while they had both promised him they would behave and work as a team, he could hear them both bicker like kids. It would be hilarious if only they weren’t adults–or at the very least they were  _supposed_  to be such.

Switching his phone to silent mode, he heaved one of the same sighs Paulina threw his way when he got home way too late at night. His head fell back against the seatback of his office chair and his eyes fell shut.

He had had to explain to his men why Vladimir had a woman in his office and why her screams weren’t of pleasure–and it had caused many a giggle. He had also had to explain the new agreement with Fisk and had warned them not to spill too much information when the new girl was present because you never know what she might use it for. But most of those guys were just as horny as Vladimir was stubborn and Tolya truly didn’t want to think of the shit they might end up saying just to get into Y/N’s panties. And all of this just because his stupid brother hadn’t said a word to anyone but Aslan.

“You are so fucking stubborn, I swear to God!” Anatoly smirked at Y/N’s yell. He interlocked his fingers above his abdomen and rested his feet on the desk. The last thing he wanted to hear was those two cursing each other through the not-so-thin walls of the building when they were supposed to be processing the data for the upcoming shipment, but he didn’t have much to do until Sergei came back.

So, he made himself comfortable in his chair, lit up a cigarette and stared at the ceiling as he eavesdropped.

Opposite Anatoly’s office was Vladimir’s. It was bigger but spartan compared to his brother’s, with just the absolute bare minimum–a desk, two chairs, an old and ruined couch and a filing cabinet he rarely used–and all this because Tolya hated it when Vlad wrecked anything around him when he got mad.

 _It shouldn’t be your business_ , Vladimir had told his brother many a time, but he secretly enjoyed being cared for. They had grown up with no one else but each other and now that they had left Russia for what could very well be forever, he often felt lonelier than ever.

“My office and my business!” he retorted, refraining himself from manhandling that girl–the last thing he wanted was his brother behind his ass ready to piss him off because he  _should just fucking behave, the last thing we need is to end up on Fisk’s bad side_.

As if he cared.

 _As if he fucking cared_.

“We do as  _I_  say, end of discussion.”

He was faced with her scoff and she, too, had to refrain herself from slapping his cheek purple–the last thing she wanted was to have Wesley shoved up her ass because he  _knew you should have stayed with me so that I could have harassed you all day long_. He wouldn’t actually use those words–obviously not: he cared about his job, he feared Fisk and, most of all, he still tried to be a gentleman, even if he failed at times–but she knew the crush he had on her and…  _Boy_. She’d rather suck this headstrong Russian’s dick than go back to work for James Wesley. “ _My_  way of doing things is more efficient,” she rebutted.

“More efficient my ass!”

Vladimir was lowering his voice now and even if she didn’t know that was his subconscious way of saying ‘I’m so pissed I could kill you and tear you apart with my bare hands’, she still understood the underlying shift in the mood. Still, heaven curse her if she decided to let the argument go.

“You’re not even willing to try! What’s your problem? Does your ego feel challenged by some girl who’s definitely better than you at this?”

His hands balled up into fists–but she didn’t notice and she didn’t cower down, either. She stood her ground and she kept glaring at him and Vladimir felt like smashing his computer against the back of her head.

“You are so fucking stupid!” She was so mad now that she felt like crying and she wasn’t proud to say that her voice  _had_  cracked towards the end of the exclamation. Her words were followed by a grunt and Vladimir’s only response was a scoff.

He was done with her and she was done with him. It had taken them a day–just one, stupid, endless day–to realize they weren’t made to work together.

“You could at least try.”

They had both calmed down when she spoke again–it had taken them almost two hours to put their ego aside, but it didn’t matter.

“No, I said.”

“You have an agreement with my boss,” she pointed out. It was something she loved: to twist the knife in the wound and remind Vladimir–or anyone else, for that matter, it wasn’t that she genuinely hated Vladimir to hell and back–that he was nothing but a pawn, and that she stood above him, for she was somewhat more valuable to Fisk than those Russians. Or, at least, she prayed every day for that to be the case: it didn’t matter that she worked in that field, the criminal underworld shook her to the bone, and even more so when she could be risking her own skin.

The man grunted, but he did stop typing away on his computer.

“Let me move the location of the payment to a safer one and let me fix the rules for who comes and who doesn’t. You have nothing to lose and by cooperating, my boss will give you more. You heard Wesley’s words.”

“Weasel can go fuck itself.”

She chuckled. “I’ve been telling him the same ever since I started to work with him.”

He looked up at her and had to fight against the muscles in his left cheek because he really, truly didn’t want to smirk in amusement at something  _she_  said. She was the enemy and he was so  _not_ going to do it her way. She would end up fucking things up and he, Anatoly and their men would end up in shit deeper than his ego.

“Look, I don’t want to work with you, either. You’re stubborn and, quite frankly, a dick–and I’ve been here for a little over one day. You’re an obstinate piece of shit that would rather risk his own business than listen to what someone who can spy on people, as you love to put it, tells you. And you irk me like crazy and I know I’ll end up with white hair before the month ends. If I survive, that is. But it’s free to try and if it’s gonna be a flop, you can shoot me wherever you want.”

“I won’t do as you say, but I will still shoot you if you don’t shut up.”

And just like that, the temperature of the room surpassed that of the Sun as their anger spiked again. It was one thing to work with a dick and it was another to be insulted by said dick. Y/N always did her best to be obliging and good at what she did, and if there was one thing she hated, it was people who thought they knew better when it clearly wasn’t the case.

And it was one thing to work with a woman and another to have said woman walk over him  _and his authority_  just because she thought she knew better when it clearly wasn’t the case.

They weren’t that different, after all. Stubborn, with a foul mouth that wasn’t going to be kept shut when there were insults to throw and anger to let loose–they  _really_  were each other’s match, Anatoly wasn’t wrong. But the thing was, they were both too similar, they were both too stubborn and they both always stood their ground like bulls ready for a fight.

“Your head is so shoved up your ass that-”

“Do you know who you’re talking to, huh?” Vladimir was pure rage now: it was like being in a fight, like the one he got out victorious from three nights before, when he stopped being a person and rather turned into something else. He took a step forward and, so wrapped up into his own angry fog, his blood boiled hotter in his brain when she didn’t take a step back.

Instead, she chuckled. Her face was burning and she was fuming, and if it hadn’t been for Anatoly, who had finally decided to intervene and put an end to what could have turned into a never-ending argument, she was sure either she or Vladimir would have ended up dead.

She glanced quickly at Anatoly, a smirk plastered on her lips, and then turned back to Vladimir with a mocking gasp. “Shit, look at this big bad Russian mobster king!” Her right hand dramatically planted itself above her heart as she rolled her eyes. “Do you think I care? You think you’re scaring me? Oh my God, look at me, trembling in fear!”

“Watch your mouth.”

“Or what? You’re gonna stuck the barrel of your gun down my throat?”

“I might as well choke you on it.”

“Is that because your ego is so big that your dick is like a skinny finger?”

Anatoly choked on his spit–and on a chuckle–before intervening: he grasped Y/N’s arm and pulled her back before his brother found a way to  _truly_  fuck things up. “Okay, kiddo, enough.”

“This is not even my fault! If he only listened with his ears and not his asshole-”

“I said,  _enough_.” The tone of Anatoly’s voice managed to shut her up, but it still didn’t stop her from glaring at him with eyes full of hatred. “And  _you_ ,” he continued, pointing a finger at his brother, “will stop it, too.”

Vladimir simply cussed in Russian, staring the girl down with a sneer on his face, fingers twitching with the need to throw a punch. He sure as hell knew where to spend the night, now.

“If this is how you two work together, I might as well drop you off somewhere and have Wesley pick you up to get rid of you. We are working toward same goal, no need to fight like dogs. You better drop weapons or I will kick your asses until you get civil.  _Da_?”

Vlad stared at his brother, eyebrows furrowed in anger, but eventually groaned a ‘ _da_ ’ back. That still wasn’t going to be his surrender.

“I said,  _da_?” Anatoly didn’t turn towards her, but Y/N knew he was talking with her now. His grasp on her forearm turned into a vice grip and when he turned around, the look in her eyes made her swallow.

“ _Da_ ,” she mocked at the end, but she, too, wasn’t going to surrender that easily.

“I don’t want to hear any more screaming or I’ll come with loaded gun.”

*

The next couple of days Y/N didn’t show up at the garage. She had called Tolya–for she sure as hell wasn’t going to call  _Vladimir_ –and told him she had stuff for Wesley to do. Urgent stuff, stuff that couldn’t wait. None of them knew it was just a made-up excuse. And, to be honest, none of them needed to know yet, either.

It had been the best three days Vladimir had ever had at work. His headache had managed to shrink down and was now a fading thudding at the back of his head, where someone managed to hit him dirty during one of the fights he participated in.

He still couldn’t swallow the fact that Anatoly had forced him to organize the shipment and its meeting the way  _she_  wanted, but he still had one day to make his brother change his mind.  _Hers_ could very well be the best way to go, he wasn’t denying this–at least, he wasn’t denying it in her  _absence_ , for he sure as hell would never tell so to her face–but he still didn’t trust her. She hadn’t given or told him anything to make him trust her and he knew that everything she’d ever do would always push him harder into the ‘she’s a liar and a spy’ corner. There simply was no way out of it: she hacked into people’s lives  _for a living_  and even if it had been a hobby, nothing would change.

Vladimir didn’t trust Wesley, either, and therefore didn’t trust Fisk–Wesley because he was a sycophant, Fisk because he believed himself to be a shark when he was not. Sure, Fisk was more powerful and he didn’t have to hide in front of the society: his job had an illegal side hidden away in the shadows, but it was what people saw that mattered. Vladimir, on the other hand, was a criminal–born and raised, he had it in his blood and in his DNA. He had scars and tattoos that proved it and a criminal record that didn’t lie. Anatoly was a criminal, too, and all his men had committed some form of crime. There simply was no running away from that. They didn’t have a clean face that could protect them.

To be fair, Vladimir didn’t trust almost anybody. He had learned the hard way what putting your trust into someone else’s hands could mean and how it could end–he still bore those signs on his skin and in his mind. He didn’t take part in illegal fights because he was a good guy or because he needed to train. He took part in illegal fights because he loved to beat and the sight and taste of blood. It was his way to cool off and no respectable person followed his same ritual.

But the thing was, he was no respectable person. Never had been and never will be.

Did he care? Not one bit.

And it was because he was  _not_  a good person that he knew not to trust others. He knew what disreputable people could do to you and he wasn’t going to let anyone bring him back  _there_ –or to some similar place, for that matter. There was a reason if he had come up with his rules. They made things easier and they made things better and as long as he followed them, he knew nothing bad would happen. Nothing bad would happen because he was not risking neither his freedom nor his life and he wasn’t giving anyone a chance to get to him.

At the same time, though, he  _desperately_  wanted to trust somebody–somebody that wasn’t his brother. He needed that safety in life, to know that someone that wasn’t blood had his back and would do their best to shield it from back-stabbing attacks.

This didn’t mean he wanted to trust  _her_.

 _Jesus Christ_ , no.

He wasn’t… Nah. She had built her life around spying people and that was definitely not his idea of a trustworthy ally. At the same time, though, spying and hacking skills could come in handy one day, for you never know how life could go. Today the wind pushes you forward, tomorrow it could blow against you and leave you screwed.

But this was hardcore trusting and he already had all his problems. He trusted her even less for the mere fact that Wesley–and therefore Fisk–had sent her. And not just sent her, they had  _forced_  him and his brother to let her work with them.

And now…

Now she disappeared.

For a couple of days.

Because she ‘had stuff for Wesley to do’.

_This is all bullshit._

He had tried to warn his brother about Y/N’s lies, but good God, the things a good-looking chick did to Tolik, despite him already having a woman. They got his dick hard and his brain fucked and next thing you know, dear Tolya can’t tell good from wrong anymore and is just left a horny puppet.

But in Vlad’s mind, this was a sign. A sign from fucking God. Even better, from the fucking Mother of God. This was Y/N selling away her cover: she must have gone to Wesley or to her boss, told them Vladimir Ranskahov didn’t want to cooperate and that their plan to deceive the Russians wasn’t working.

And  _slava Bogu_ , it wasn’t working! Vladimir wasn’t going to let such a plan work. There was no way he was going to risk not only his financial stability but also his  _life_ because some girl was so adamant on doing things her way. She could have tricked Tolya, but she wasn’t going to trick him. He wasn’t going to let that happen.

Not with a shipment less than twenty-four hours away.

Big money depended on that and he truly– _truly_ –didn’t want things to go off like a bomb he had no way to shield himself from.

If anything, he had bottled everything up and unleashed it all into the fights he had fought that night. He had beaten three  _mudaki_  to a pulp, left them crying like snotty babies, and holy fuck, had that been liberating!

So much so that he didn’t even feel the dull pain in his legs or in his knuckles as he walked up the stairs to get to his apartment.

Tonight was a good night. To be honest, any day that ended in a fight let a good night start. But it didn’t matter, not now, and Volodya didn’t care about such details.

He had just put his key into the lock of his door when the door behind him opened. He heard it as clear as day, that same squeaking whimper he hadn’t heard in months, ever since his former neighbor had moved out almost a year ago. After that, the apartment had been empty.

It had always been empty.

It had been empty that morning, he was quite sure of that.

Or was he? He had left in such a hurry, trying to get to the garage as soon as possible that he…

_Was apartment empty this morning?_

There was no way he could grab the gun he had hastily shoved into the belt of his pants, not without the other person noticing. And possibly reacting faster. He could also use his key as a weapon but-

_I’m not going to be fast enough._

In the confinements of his own mind, they were taking him back to Utkin once again.

 _Fuck_.

“Hello, neighbor.”

That voice had been both a blessing and a curse, for when he turned around, body stiff and muscles tensed, it was Y/N that stood before him.

“I just moved in,” she continued with a smirk, eyes glinting evilly. “Thought I’d say hi.”

She knew where he lived, then.


	5. Miklos Dobos

Vladimir had never been this close to Y/N. Stuffed on the back seat of the car with her between him and his brother, he was seething.

Her shoulder pressed against his and his knee bumped against hers every time Aslan drove over a hole in the asphalt, almost as though he was doing it on purpose. He didn’t know if the buzzing feeling in his brain was due to such close proximity on her part or simply because he was still pissed by the fact that Tolya had allowed her– _had insisted and bugged him all day for her_ –to come with them. It was probably a combination of both, but Volodya didn’t exactly care. As long as he didn’t have to drive her home, he was good.

Or, at least, he was good as long as he kept his distance from his own apartment. He had known right from the start that the chances of Y/N having dipped into the privacy of his life were pretty high, but he had never considered, in the days he had spent trying to work with her–keyword:  _trying_ –that she would do something like moving in next door.

If this wasn’t the sign he had been waiting for–consciously or not–, the proof of her spying on him and his brother and his  _business_  in general, he truly didn’t know what else could be. She hadn’t stopped working for Fisk just as she had never started to work for him, he reasoned now.

Now more than ever he wished he had someone to cover his back or to stop his finger from pulling the trigger of his gun because he didn’t want to disappoint his brother by killing that woman.

Her presence in the apartment in front of his–and next to him now, for that matter–had the same shocking effect of dipping naked in ice-cold water. And he had done that–and on many an occasion–but he had never been forced to and it had never been a surprise.

This, however, was a lot more than his already feeble patience could take.

And to ask him–to  _force him_ –to take Y/N along to go ransom the last part of the payment before the shipment got–well–shipped was like asking him to suddenly turn into a saint when he wasn’t even a good person, to begin with.

“Did we really have to-”

“Don’t start now,” Tolik cut him off, slightly turning his head in his brother’s direction to warn him that his patience was running thin.

They had both used Russian–Vladimir because he didn’t give a fuck, Anatoly because he  _did_  give a fuck and the last thing he wanted was to risk insulting  _her_  and end up on the first page of a hacker’s black book.

No one spoke again after that, at least not before Aslan reached the location Y/N had chosen and turned off the engine.

“They’re not here yet,” Sergei pointed out, sticking his head out of the window to check the area. “What do we do now?”

“Now we wait.” Y/N’s back was relaxed against the leather seat of the SUV as she opened up the laptop she had on her knees and switched it on.

Her calmness was irritating: it made Vladimir’s skin itch and his brain pound like a military march in the confinements of his skull. He truly didn’t know what it was about her that had that effect on him and made that sort of primal instinct resurface, but here he was and he was definitely  _not_ happy.

Who did she think she was to know what to do better than him or his brother? To claim the right to  _choose_  what was good and what was wrong in  _his_  business? To stomp into his office and demand he follow her orders? Like some  _dog_?

And now here they were, at the pier, the Hudson river peacefully flowing in front of them. The gentle night breeze breathed in through the open front window, caressing their cheeks with its cool tendrils, and it carried the sound of honks being pressed on in the early night traffic. And still, the Hungarians were nowhere to be seen.

Vladimir already didn’t like them–and it wasn’t because the  _mudaki_  were late, for it wasn’t  _that_  late when he checked his watch. He hated them because they always tried to trick him, because there was this one Hungarian dick at the fights that seemed to have taken it upon himself to piss the shit out of Vladimir. He wasn’t part of the mob, of course, he was just some twenty-four bitch that had fun beating the blood out of people’s noses, but it was such a minuscule detail that Vlad didn’t care.

And if this was going to turn out to be the debacle of Dobos’ irritating organization, then so be it. Vladimir Ranskahov was just waiting for the right time to lower the saber on the dick’s neck and watch his pitiful society die like a rat in a trap.

What pissed him off even more was, again, Y/N’s presence not just in the car, but  _at the meeting_. There was no way he was going to let a newbie take part to it, and it wasn’t just because she hacked things for someone else–or, well, maybe yeah, maybe that was part of the reason behind his annoyance.

The biggest issue was Miklos Dobos’ attitude towards newbie–or people in general, for that matter. He didn’t trust them, and even when–and  _if_ –they won his trust, he still continued on with his doubts and he’d do anything in his power to protect himself as best as he could. And this usually translated into stricter controls and suspects–and greater irritation on the part of the people that had to deal with him.

Which, in this case, translated into the figure of Vladimir Ranskahov. And he was anything  _but_ happy.

Vlad had his own problems with newbies, too–he didn’t know about Tolya, but he sure as hell  _did_ have problems with newbies. And from this point of view, he wasn’t even that different from Dobos. He only worked with people he trusted, who had crimes behind their backs that he respected, and who respected him. Y/N didn’t have his trust  _nor_  his respect– _yet_ , for he wanted to hope that one day he would be able to at least  _stand_  her.

Newbies could very well be time bombs in situations like the one they were all going to live. They could get scared at anything, or blurt out something they should have never told, or do crap in general and blow everything up. It was a fragile world, the underworld. It sure had a tough face, but the body was of fine crystal and anything could shatter it. Alliances were never forever–it didn’t matter how hard Wesley was fucking himself with that idea, even the whole Gao-Fisk-Ranskahovy affiliation was going to go to shit one day–and literally anything could undermine a thriving organization. Newbies were that threat: they could inadvertently blow a whole world up if they hadn’t been delivered the right education.

This was exactly why Vladimir and Anatoly Ranskahov refused to hire anyone who hadn’t served their time in jail–be it in Russia or America or anywhere else on the globe, it didn’t really matter, not as much as the committed crime did. And hacking into people’s lives and businesses didn’t exactly count as a crime in the brothers’ eyes. It was something anyone could do–at varying degrees, of course. They might not have been able to hack into someone’s bank account, but they still knew their ways and had their informants–or they could just use a gun and get it over with it.

Yet, this girl was probably going to prove herself to be one of his nightmares.

Vladimir was sure she hadn’t even seen a corpse before. Sure, she might have seen Granny or Gramps in their coffin, dead people on the news or on newspapers, but she had never been mere inches from someone who had just been shot in the head, nor had she ever had someone else’s blood splatter on her face or on her clothes.

She was a fucking time bomb, ticking their last seconds away, and Vlad couldn’t understand how Anatoly couldn’t see it.

It was Anatoly’s idea to let her come–maybe she had bugged him too, but Tolik had had the last word on the matter. It was Anatoly’s idea that they accept her presence just because some fat dick wanted so. And if they were going to go down in a bloodbath, it was going to be Anatoly’s idea and Vladimir was going to have the right excuse to kick his brother’s ass all the way into the afterlife.

“What are you doing?” She had stuck something into her laptop and may he be damned if he wasn’t going to find out what that was. He was no tech-genius, and at the same time, he was no stupid.

“Blocking phone signal,” she shrugged, sparing him a glance before going back to work. “I’m going to knock out their chances of calling anyone, but your phones won’t be immune, either. So I guess this is the time I understand whether I can trust you or not.”

Vladimir scoffed. “What about you?”

“Told you on day one.” She turned towards him this time and one of her hand ran to partially lower the monitor of her laptop. “I’m not here to spy. I’m here to help you. You are one stubborn dick, aren’t you?”

“And you are sneaky bitch. You still have not proved my suspicions wrong.”

But another car had parked on the other side of the open space, a grey Mercedes whose shiny surface reflected the light of the lampposts nearby. They stared as Dobos’ driver got out of the car and only then did Aslan and Sergei follow his example.

“Stay down and try not to get seen,” Anatoly ordered her, fixing the holster of his gun underneath the jacket of his suit.

“This would have been easier if you hadn’t let her come,” Vladimir commented in Russian and as he exited the car, he missed Y/N’s smirk at his words.

But she did as she was told: she crouched down behind the driver’s seat, laptop resting where Vladimir had been sat just seconds before and prayed with all her might to get out of that meeting alive and undiscovered.

Vladimir was praying, too, and he truly couldn’t fathom how his brother could be so calm and composed when they were basically violating the accords they had with the Hungarians.

Dobos got out of his car only when the Ranskahovs had reached their driver and Sergei. He was an imposing man: tall, big, with broad shoulders and a shiny bald head that shone brighter than the recently-washed roof of his own car.

He was a chicken, though, and the Ranskahovs knew that, and that was why he was flanked on either side by two other men, big but not as big as he was, with scarred faces and tattooed necks.

What irked Vladimir was the fact that those two bodyguards were new, they weren’t the ones Miklos Dobos usually used when they had to meet. He had never seen them, hadn’t been informed of that change and he did not like that. Not one bit.

“New men I see,” he groaned, pointing at the people in question with a nod of his head.

Dobos smirked and the fingers of his right hand rose to touch the crucifix that hung from his necklace. “Others have gone meet God.” He stopped two feet behind his driver and a fourth man got out of the front seat of the grey car, opened the trunk and grabbed two black bags. “Did you ship shipment?”

“We ship when meeting is over,” Anatoly pointed out. Dobos’ question ringed suspicious to his ears, for he had never asked such dumb things, but he didn’t think about it, not immediately at least. “You know that. It’s how we work, or have you forgotten?”

Dobos grimaced and threw a glance at the man on his left, a quick glance that Vladimir didn’t like. The Hungarian’s behavior was starting to smell fishy. “Three hundred grands,” he said and the man that had joined the party last let the bags fall to the ground in the no man’s land that separated the two parties. “Like accord.”

Sergei had already taken a step forward when Vladimir stopped him with a hand on the shoulder. “We check it first,” he declared and he himself walked to the bags, picked them up and then retreated, not turning his back to the Hungarians in front of him.

And stinking it was: Miklos Dobos gritted his teeth, his hand reaching the crucifix once again, but after a second of tension, he let out a soft sigh. “Why would we cheat you, Ranskahov? We have always paid.”

True, but they had never ordered such a big shipment and they had never had to pay such big money.

“New policies,” Vlad grinned. He took a step back and when Dobos’ men moved their hands over their guns, he spoke again. “I’m going to count money on hood of our car.”

It was going to be a slow count, every present was sure of that, but no one protested–not even Dobos, too intent in praying God Vladimir would be quick and superficial in his counting.

Vlad dropped the bags on the hood, still grinning in the direction of the other men, and as he turned, he briefly met Y/N’s questioning gaze as she stared at him from between the front seats behind which she was hiding.  _You better start praying too, girl_ , he thought, for he was sure the meeting was going to end in blood.

He unzipped the first bag slowly, almost begging he was just being paranoid and took out the first wad of bills. He counted them, touched them, almost sniffed them, but the green money was real. As were the bills in the second, third and fourth wads. He couldn’t say the same about those in the fifth: the first and last bills of the wad didn’t seem weird, but the ones in the middle didn’t seem to flow like the ones he had handled until now.

Brows furrowed, he refrained himself from turning towards Tolik or from seizing his gun. It could very well be his paranoia playing tricks on him. There was no reason why the Hungarians, weak as they were, would trick them. They had always paid on time and with nice money–maybe less than tonight, but that didn’t matter. And sure, their society was on the rise these days, but it didn’t mean anything.

His hands still ripped the band keeping the wad together and he stared at them as if those tattooed fingers belonged to someone else.

He was so  _not_  in the mood for blood or killing, tonight. He just wanted to stop to buy a pizza, go home and watch the boxing match on TV, drink more vodka than his stomach and liver could stand and smoke a well-deserved cigarette in the quietness of his apartment. It didn’t matter that he had Y/N living just next door, he was going to enjoy the rest he worked so hard for.

But Dobos thought he could play him. Thought he could trick someone who had been tricked by life in worse ways. Thought he could trick who now considered himself untrickable–though he was, and that fucking cheap mob boss proved that he could, indeed, be played like a whore.

The bills in the fifth wad had been counterfeited.

His fingers twitched, his tattooed rings burned and as his gaze met Y/N’s once again, he felt the blood in his brain reach boiling point.

“Everything alright?” came Dobos’ voice and at that moment it  _did_  sound like a dead’s voice.

“ _Da_ ,” he yelled back, but he was still staring at the girl in his car and he wished she could do something, let Tolya or Aslan or Seriozha know they had to open fire on those motherfuckers. He snapped the bands of the wads he had checked open, piled the bills in a neat stack and grabbed both them and the bags before going back to the others. “But I have question,” he continued as the bags fell to the ground with a dull  _thud_. His left hand knocked twice on his left thigh and as his own men and Tolik were staring at him, he knew they had caught the message. “What, exactly, made you think you could play us?”

In a heartbeat, the bills he had had in his right hand were flying through the air, momentarily blinding Dobos and his men, while the Ranskahovs and their own men fired.

The deafening sound of shots seemed to roll down the street lights, tumbling over Dobos’ Mercedes before, a heartbeat later, shell casings jingled on the wet asphalt.


	6. Trust Issues

“What the fuck?”

Y/N’s choked scream came as a surprise. On one thing, Vladimir Ranskahov had been right: she had never seen a corpse and now that she stood just meters from  _four_ , she couldn’t help the trembling in her legs.

When the men turned around, diverting their attention from the four criminals at their feet, they saw she had left the security of the car. Surprisingly enough, she had been the first to react and as she stared at them with eyes full of shock and fear, Vladimir was the second.

His brain was working a thousand miles an hour and as his fingers tightened around the grip of his gun, he thought he could shoot her down. A bullet between the eyes and all would be over with. But the more he stared, the more his rational mind fought that urge, and the more his anger boiled and screamed throughout his whole body.

How was it that the first–and hopefully  _last_ –time they brought her along, they almost got played like some kids? She comes, she does her juju with the phone signal and Dobos is ready to try his luck and overthrow him.

Before his rational mind had the time to realize it, he had her pinned against the side of the car, the hot muzzle of his gun just a breath away from kissing her temple.

And suddenly, all was calm once again. His mind had stopped racing, his blood had stopped boiling, his breath had evened out. His hold was gentle on the gun, the coarse surface of its grip a soothing caress against his cold palm. There wasn’t the sudden surge of adrenaline he got during a fight, nor the buzzing enthusiasm of anticipation coursing through his muscles. There was calm.  _He_  was calm, for the world had gone silent and all he could hear was the soft whisper of her breath against his chin.

“Do you have anything to do with this?” The tone of his voice burned harder than the still warm muzzle of his gun near her skin, but she didn’t dare move away. Nor speak up.

“Let her go.”

Anatoly had finally entered her peripheral vision and even though his presence calmed her enough to distract her from her churning fear, she couldn’t but stare in Vladimir’s gaze of steel. “No,” she eventually whispered, wishing she had just stayed in the car–that she had just stayed at Wesley’s side, for she knew, no matter how much she disliked him, that he’d protect her somehow.

“You knock out phones and then they come and Dobos has new men. Money he gives us is fake. Why shouldn’t I shoot you?”

“You have already made up your mind about me, even though I told you I’m here to help. Why are you asking, then?”

“Because you spy on people,” he casually answered. “And I do not trust you.”

“I guess you either shoot people in the head or you trust them, then. You don’t give anyone the benefit of the doubt. But if you’re waiting for me to confess you that I somehow knew of their trick, you’ll be left waiting forever, even long after you’ve killed me.”

“No one will kill anyone tonight,” Anatoly intervened, tearing the gun from his brother’s grasp. “Why you have to be so paranoid, I truly do not know,” he added as he pushed Vladimir backward. “What we must do now is dash back to garage before police come here.”

*

Y/N couldn’t understand Vladimir and still, at the same time, she could. She had spent the majority of her life not knowing who to trust, or if trusting that person was going to make her end up in trouble, and at the same time she had never stopped hoping she could stop, just for one minute, and give the people that stood in front of her the benefit of the doubt.

To give a chance had always felt stupid–and  _dangerous_. It had always made her whole body shiver in fear and anticipation, her muscles ready for the jump of her life in case things went downhill. But she had tried, and so far Fisk and Wesley had yet to fail her.

But now, as she stood in a corner of the garage as the Russians argued together, she felt small and insignificant under Vladimir’s accusatory glare. That and the silent treatment he had reserved her in the car scared her more than a gun pointed at her head.

Silent was… terrifying. It was the unknown slowly but surely transforming itself into a ghostly body of its own and she could almost feel its icy breath trace the line of her spine.

Vladimir Ranskahov was predictable when he screamed, for he would never attack as long as his mind was busy yelling at somebody. She had learned that long before she had actually met him, his past had been an open book once she had found her way in, and it had been easier to read than Anatoly’s. When his anger got the best of him, he was the only one at risk of dying as the scorching emotion burned him alive. But when he went silent and his body got as still as a predator stilled before it lunged at its prey– _that_  was the moment you should be scared, the moment you should pray your fight-or-flight instinct kicked in and self-preservation brought you to safety.

Vladimir was easy to read when he let events take the best of him, for then he was still a man. But when his survival instinct surfaced and he couldn’t even feel the wound on his arm left behind by a flying bullet, the same wound Sergei was now sewing up, that was when he turned into the animal that got out of Utkin.

She wasn’t sure whether he knew it or not, or if maybe it had just turned into an instinctual behavior when he felt like his life was at risk, but he still knew how to use it in his favor. That version of him scared him more than the sight of those four men left dead on the pavement, back at the piers.

Had she gone through what Vladimir had been forced to live, she wouldn’t trust herself either.

But she was here and she was willing to help–willing to put her own life in the spotlight of the unknown and of the risks it threatened her with–and she couldn’t but feel like the stupid kid that had hoped too much when hope had never entered her house.

And as she eavesdropped those criminals talk and reason together, she wished she had been honest from the start–at her own risk. She spoke Russian and therefore understood every ill and every nice word they had ever said about her, the things they said during their Russian-only meetings, the insults they threw at Wesley and Fisk when they thought she didn’t understand shit. It had all been a game so far and she had always thought she was the cat and they the mice, when it had always been the other way around. She had learned the meaning of Vladimir’s tattoos and had always laughed at them, but now that he had her life in his hands–now that she had been foolish enough to move into the apartment across from his–she wished there was still time for sincerity.

“Y/N, come here!”

But now, as her body obeyed Anatoly’s order before her brain had the time to process it, she knew her confession could only do more harm than good–and it didn’t matter that she had nothing to do with the Hungarian and his plans. Nor that she was deliberately ignoring Fisk’s orders to give him inside info on the Russians so that he could control them better.

And with each step she took, she could feel herself shrink and get smaller, almost as if she could disappear so as not to face Vladimir’s wrath.  _He_  was her biggest fear, but as the saying goes, keep your friends close and your enemies even closer.

She had most likely overestimated herself.

Sergei was applying the last stitches, but Vlad never flinched, not even once. It was almost as though he couldn’t feel it, almost as though he were still in beast-mode. She had never wished she had Wesley at her side as much as she wished for it now.

“Why did you want us to change place for meeting?” Aslan’s voice wasn’t as threatening: it was calm, soft, and even though she suspected he was anything but, she was still thankful.

“Because you’ve always been stupid enough to give your clients the upper hand.” It was almost an out-of-body experience, or as close as she could get to one: part of her wanted to cower away as her self-defense mechanism finally kicked in, and another part of her welcomed it as her muscles started to slowly relax.

It didn’t matter that she had done her best to focus on Aslan’s face because she had kept Vladimir in her peripheral vision and her mind had been more focused on him than on his man. And so, when he tightened his jaw, she didn’t miss the movement.

“We never give anyone upper hand,” he growled.

She sighed, half in exhaustion and half in contentment, for he was slowly slipping back into his angry self, burying the beast deep inside his mind once again. It didn’t mean complete safety–to think that meant you were only a fool–, but it also didn’t mean immediate death, either. It was a dangerous yet comfortable middle ground that Y/N knew how to handle–sort of.

“We keep eye on them,” Anatoly agreed, forcing her to sit on the chair in front of his brother, who was sat on the desk Sergei often used as his accounting office.

“But you still trust their choices too blindly. What would have happened if tonight’s meeting had been held where those people wanted to?”

“I don’t know, you tell us,  _spy_.”

Vladimir was stubborn. She thought she had known it before she had started to work with him, but being in his presence had proved her wrong. He had turned out to be more inflexible than anyone she had ever met–and she was used to working with  _Wesley_ , who was only happy if and when things were done  _his_  way. Working with him should have been the right training to be able to manage Vladimir Ranskahov, but either it wasn’t the case or they weren’t as similar in their stubbornness as she had previously thought.

“The guy could have had more men.”

“They cannot bring ‘more men’,” Vladimir mocked her, yanking his shirt out of Anatoly’s grasp. “It’s deal.”

“Yeah, like paying you with Monopoly cash, apparently.”

“It had never happened. Maybe it was  _you_  who tried to work with  _vengry_ and play us.”

She scoffed. “I work for you, and therefore for Wesley  _and therefore_  for Fisk. Fisk is the one who signs my checks, not your cheating friends. Why would I side with them to trick you and risk getting shot and then dumped into the Hudson? I thought you were stupid, but I swear to God, you’re on another level! If you stopped being this paranoid for one second, you’d realize I just made you a favor.”

“ _A favor_?”

“Volya,  _zamolchi_ ,” Anatoly threatened. He wasn’t in the mood to play the peacemaker, not tonight, not after the flop with Dobos. He just wanted to go home, fuck Paulina into tomorrow, and then spend the next day sleeping to avoid coming to work and deal with his brother.

He was tired, but neither Vladimir nor Y/N seemed to realize how close to combustion he was.

“And you,” he pointed at her, “no more insults.”

“You all still doubting my loyalty after me trying to help you is an insult, me stating the truth is not. If your brother would just get his head out of his butt and use his brain for something that’s not murder,  _for once_ , he’d see I’m not the spy he thinks I am.”

And she wasn’t going against Fisk’s direct orders just to be called a liar and be stepped onto by some criminals.

“I don’t doubt you,” Tolya sighed. Aslan had quietly distanced himself from them and was now checking the rest of Dobos’ money with Sergei, both sitting in a cab. “You tried to help and Hungarians did shit. It was just coincidence.”

“Of course it was not!”

There was a fight, then: Anatoly had to stop himself from attacking his brother and Vladimir had to do the same. Y/N simply estranged herself from the scene and with the fact that they had switched back to Russian, she was able to cut their voices out of her mind without much of a problem.

She understood paranoia–she really did–, but she didn’t understand when someone just wanted to be an ass. And she wasn’t in the mood to put up with it, not now that the surge of fear-induced adrenaline had died down and all she could see before her eyes were the corpses of four criminals lying on the pavement.

It had all happened so quickly that she had barely had the time to register what the heck was going on. One second Vladimir was checking the money in front of her and the next, dollar bills were flying in the air as the Russians shot the Hungarians down. They had been quick and she hadn’t exactly understood how Tolya, Sergei and Aslan had known they had to open fire that their guns had already shot.

It didn’t matter. Only Dobos had the luck to fire a blind shot, grazing Vladimir’s arm, before he went down like a trunk. Even above the sound of the echoing shots at the pier and now, above the Ranskahovs’ heated argument, she could hear Miklos Dobos’ body thudding against the asphalt. She didn’t know how, she didn’t even want to know why, but that was the sound her brain had put on a loop as all she could see was the perfectly centered hole in the man’s forehead.

She didn’t know who had gunned him down, but she knew that if Vladimir got pissed enough with her, that was how  _she_ was going to go down–a bleeding hole in the middle of her forehead, brains splattered everywhere as she fell down to the floor.

Dead.  _Lifeless_.

This wasn’t the first time she feared for her life, but it was definitely the first where she felt like she was so close to the end of her life and to meet the Creator.

_Fuck_.

She had been so dumb. Moving in next to a criminal? What had she been thinking? Now that she found herself in the company of murderers–not that they hadn’t already been before, it was just that now she had seen them at work–that unplanned decision suddenly didn’t feel like a good one anymore.

If Vladimir decided that he really didn’t trust her and that he was tired of her, he could… He lived mere  _feet_  from her: he just had to cross the hallway to…

She couldn’t think it. She couldn’t form that thought in her mind.

And yet, it was an easy one.  _Death_  was easy. You go down and you leave this world and it all happens in a fraction of a second. All the rest is just torture–or torturous wait. All she needed was an unexpected millisecond to leave this world for good. And all Vladimir needed was the previous millisecond, before he opened the door of his apartment and drilled her body with bullets.

Y/N had thought that  _working with Wesley_  had been torture. Do this and do that and dodge his advances and play deaf when he told her anything that could be interpreted as sexual. And it wasn’t just that, it wasn’t just that all he wanted to do was fuck her and that he didn’t waste any occasion to remind her that. It was that he wanted her to do things a certain way, even when there were way easier and faster ways to do it, and when he was pissed, he got prissy and intolerable and she had to tiptoe her way around him.

Working with actual criminals had felt like a nice change in the wind’s direction back then, when Fisk had first proposed it–or rather told her she was going to do it without giving her the chance to say anything. It had felt like freedom in a way: no more Fisk, no more Wesley, no more suits and high heels and tight buns because there wouldn’t be another Wesley that wanted her to dress that way.

She found herself hoping the Russians would ask her to dress more formally now, to come to work with freshly manicured nails and spot-on make-up. It would have been easier. And yet, she had come to work with the knowledge of all the research she had conducted on the Ranskahovs, with slightly less information about Sergei Yurchenko, who she felt was almost as important as the other two kingpins… and with her lies. She had come with white lies: she had to inform Fisk of anything that could even remotely be useful and she had to keep a close eye on the Russians–headstrong and therefore dangerous Vladimir in particular.

Technically, Vladimir was right: she was indeed there to spy. But she had done no such thing. The first couple of days it had been because she wanted to get to know them–she hadn’t succeeded. The next days it had been because she was trying to help them with the shipment–she hadn’t succeeded. Then it had been because Vladimir doubted her too much, while Anatoly seemed to at least be okay with her presence as long as she didn’t annoy him, and the other Russians were just either uninterested or they chatted a bit before they went back to work.

There technically was nothing to report–or this was the excuse she brought up when Wesley bugged her for intel. There wasn’t an exact reason why she kept her mouth shut when it came to spying on the Russians, but all she could think of was that her silence meant more time away from her usual office, job, and colleague.

“Vladimir will accompany you home.” Anatoly’s words felt like a punch to the stomach, one that left her breathless–and one that brought her back to reality.

She moved on her chair, the muscles in her back suddenly tense and heavy. Was that how she was going to die? In a kingpin’s car?

Vladimir didn’t say a word: there was no way he could escape his brother–and he was tired. So tired he felt like going to bed and sleep for a century, willingly embracing nightmares and spasming muscles as he waded his way through a memory lane he could not elude. So, he groaned as he jumped down from Sergei’s desk with the grace of an elephant.

He didn’t wait for her: he headed towards the exit, suit jacket thrown over his left shoulder as he retrieved a packet of cigarettes from one of its pockets.

“If he does anything, you call me,  _da_?” Anatoly softly ordered her, but Y/N didn’t turn even when he put his hand on her shoulder. “At any hour.”

“Will he kill me?” She didn’t really want to know, but at the same time, she did.

“No.”

“Why doesn’t he trust me?”

“You didn’t give him reason why he should.” The man shrugged his shoulders, his gaze fixed on her face.

“Why do you trust me, then?”

“I don’t exactly trust you either,” he confessed. “But you haven’t given me reason why I should accuse you of anything, so I’m good, for now. You don’t trust us either.” There was a smirk then, one that proved her there was more to him than what his tattoos could say.

“You are unpredictable and I never know what to expect,” she stated, and that confession seemed to cost her more than she’d ever thought.

*

The ride in Vladimir’s car was weighed down by a tense silence. She didn’t dare ask him to put out his cigarette, just as he didn’t care to ask her if him smoking was alright with her.

(It wasn’t.)

The radio was turned off and just as with his cigarette, she didn’t dare ask if she could turn it on. This was his territory and she was afraid of what he might do.

But the late-night traffic was thick that day and they both thought back at the Hungarians they had abandoned by the Hudson. The police had probably found them already, Y/N thought, not knowing Anatoly’s men had already taken care of them.

“Why did you move in next to me?”

Vladimir’s voice was tense, rougher than usual–probably because of the smoke or the anger, she didn’t really know. It took her a couple of seconds to convince herself to turn her head to look at him: he was staring ahead, his right hand gripping the wheel so hard his knuckles had turned white, almost as though the tattooed barb wire of his trips to jail had robbed them of their color. His jaw was clenched and she could see the sudden leaps of muscle underneath the skin when he gritted his teeth.

She opened her mouth, left it hanging like a fish out of water, and closed it again with a sigh. “It seemed like a good idea back then,” she answered then, gaze traveling back down his arm, skirting over the blood stain on his otherwise immaculate shirt.

“You should have not done that.”

“I guess I got it now.”

He remained silent for a while, until he finished his cigarette and threw the butt out of the open window. “My brother says I should give you chance,” he said. “‘Benefit of doubt,’ as you called it.”

She nodded, eyes lifting up from his barbed knuckles to the side of his face. For a second she was about to stretch her arm out and touch the scar that ran down from his right eyebrow to his cheek, but she tightened her fists in her lap and kept still.

“But my trust comes with price.”

“What do you want?”

He turned to stare at her then, and it scared her both because he wasn’t minding the street and because his eyes had turned to steel, to rock-hard hatred. “I want to know if you’re spying. I know you are.”

Y/N swallowed, and the movement was slow and thick and almost painful as she tried to swallow down her own fear, too. She was stronger than this. She had put up with Wesley and with Fisk–and with her family–and she was not going to give Vladimir Ranskahov the power of making her feel minuscule and insignificant, so small he could step on her and put her out the way she had watched him put out endless cigarettes, back at the garage.

But she had lied enough and there was no reason why she should continue, not now that he knew. He had always known, she had never deluded herself into thinking Vladimir was some stupid ass that could be tricked without much effort–he wasn’t like James, whom she played like a doll.

“I should be,” she found herself correcting him. “But I haven’t.”

“Why not?”

What was the reason?  _Was there_  a reason? She didn’t know.

“Why not?” he insisted. He parked in his usual lot, but the engine was still roaring under the hood of his expensive car.

Was that-? No, it couldn’t be  _his_ BMW.

“I like it, at the garage. No one bothers me. You’re stubborn and we fight a lot, I know, but I’d rather be locked up in a room with you than with Wesley.”

How had he found out she had moved here?

“If I find out you spy, I kill you.”

Was he waiting inside?

“Okay.” Her hand was trembling on the door handle, but it wasn’t out of fear nor was it because of Vladimir.

He followed her gaze, eyed the white BMW she was staring at, and eventually shrugged one shoulder as he opened his door.

Y/N’s feet weighed like lead as she walked to the elevator with Vlad at her side.

What did he want?

“Don’t come up now,” she said just before the doors to the elevator opened. “Wait a few minutes before you go up.”

“I take no orders from you.”

She stopped him with a hand in the middle of his chest, right on his sternum, and under the thin cotton of his shirt, his warm skin and hard muscles, she felt the faint thudding of his heart.

“I think Wesley is upstairs.” And she really didn’t want him to realize she lived right across from Vladimir Ranskahov.


	7. Everybody Likes Y/N

Vladimir did  _not_  wait ‘a few seconds’ to go up and instead of hopping into the elevator, he took the stairs.

His original purpose had been to tell her off: no woman touched him, not without him saying so. Touch was sacred and ever since he had moved to America, no one but the few women he had slept with had the chance to touch him. And it didn’t matter that her hand had been innocent on his chest, nor that she hadn’t hurt him: his skin still tingled underneath his shirt and he hated it. He hated the memories that contact brought back.

But then, the closer he got to his destination, the louder the voices got and he stopped in his tracks, out of sight, a few steps from reaching his floor.

Y/N had been honest. She hadn’t lied. And the surprise upon realizing so turned him into a statue.

That was Wesley’s voice. He would have recognized it anywhere, for it never failed to irk him, to make his skin prickle with annoyance and hatred.

Maybe that girl wasn’t so bad after all, he reasoned. Maybe–even if it still represented a huge risk–she wasn’t going to stab his back, at least not now.

He forgave her then–forgave her for touching him, for setting the crucifix in the middle of his chest ablaze. At least tonight, she had his back–did he have hers?

His apartment was his safe nest. He wasn’t going to call it ‘home,’ for nothing had felt like home ever since he and Tolik had been deported  _there_ , but it was still his safe hideout. Only his brother had seen its inside so far and before Y/N moved into the vacant apartment across from his, Anatoly had been the only one to know where he lived–and that he did indeed have a place to go back to at night. This was why her presence on his floor had always been unwelcome.

Until now.

Nothing she could ever find out about him could tell her how much her warning meant to him, how much he didn’t want anyone to even see his door. She could learn all she wanted about his past and she could do it by heart, but his feelings… That was something else entirely and she wasn’t going to read them.

He never opened up, not after what Tatya had done, but still this… For a second, he felt safe once again: whatever Y/N’s reason to keep him hidden was, it still meant Wesley wasn’t going to find out where he lived.

And that was a good consequence of the benefit of the doubt he had given her, one he hadn’t thought of. If it hadn’t been for her, he would have marched out of the elevator just to find himself face-to-face with James Wesley and he would have probably never been able to hear the end of it.

Maybe Tolik wasn’t that naive, after all. Maybe his brother was better at reading people than he was. Maybe that was the reason why he had found someone to spend his life with–or at least a portion of it. Maybe that was why fists weren’t the only way for his skin to crack open.

He leaned out from behind the corner of the stairwell and there he was, Wesley, one hand pressed against Y/N’s door, her back to the wooden surface.

Lost in his thoughts, he hadn’t kept up with the conversation going on between the two, but he still noticed the way her arms had gone rigid by her sides. From that distance, he couldn’t be sure of it, but he knew–he felt it in his bones, for he had seen her that livid many a time–that her brows were set in a frown, her jaw clenched, her shoulders squared.

“It happened once and it was a mistake,” she was saying and Vladimir saw her blindly fumble with the doorknob.

“Oh, come on.” Wesley took her keys from her hand and shoved them into the front pocket of his pants. “I’m mainly here for work.”

_Mainly_.

“You could have sent me an email. Working time is over even at the garage.”

“I wanted to see you.”

“I didn’t.”

Half-hidden behind the wall of the stairwell, Vladimir frowned as one hand absentmindedly felt for the gun in the holster by his ribcage.

There was a loud sigh on Wesley’s part before he took a step back and even from halfway down the corridor, Vlad saw Y/N breathe deeply.

“Our employer sent me to know how the shipment went,” the man said. He shoved a hand into his pocket and fished her keys. “I will give them back after I got what I came for.”

“You have a meeting with the Russians and Gao in a week, you’ll know anything you want to know about the shipment then. I’m answering directly to Fisk since these are the orders, and if he wants to know how things go, he himself will have to come and ask.”

“Fine.” Her keys disappeared into his tight fist once again. “At least let me in for a drink, I’ve been waiting here like an idiot for hours.”

As if he already  _wasn’t_ an idiot, Vladimir thought and he had to resist the impulse to scoff. He hated that dog, hated the way he was trying to touch her with his filthy free hand.

And he hated himself for caring. Last time he was foolish enough to care about a woman, he ended up in a damp and dark cage with his brother and two of his best men, a breath away from death.

He had no responsibility towards her, he told himself as Wesley’s fingers trailed down her cheek, the one he couldn’t see from his position. He didn’t have to do anything, it wasn’t his business, he reasoned as she wiggled away from Wesley’s touch. She had managed to handle  _him_ , and Vladimir was a difficult person to have to deal with–she wasn’t going to have any problems with that weasel.

But then she slightly turned her face towards him, still standing there half-hidden in the stairwell, and even though her purpose had been to try and avoid Wesley’s touch, her eyes locked with Vladimir’s and he had half a second to choose what to do.

He didn’t choose. If anyone asked, he would say he hadn’t chosen her. His legs had moved before his brain had the time to stop for a second and think. But still, his feet climbed the remaining steps until he reached the landing and started to walk down the corridor.

He didn’t owe her shit, he kept on repeating himself as he got closer and closer to two of his worst enemies. He wasn’t her babysitter, nor her bodyguard. He barely was her boss, and sure as hell, he wasn’t her friend. Yet, he was marching towards her and when Wesley looked up and saw him, it was too late.

“I don’t like when people harass my people,” he said calmly, slowly but surely yanking Y/N’s keys out of Wesley’s grasp.

“I could tell you the same thing,  _Ranskahov_.” Wesley wasn’t impressed–or, at least, he never showed it. The idea of getting killed by this Russian, or any other person for that matter,  _did_  turn his legs to jelly, he had to admit it, but may he be damned if he let himself show the least sign of fear. Those criminals were like animals: they smelled fear from miles away, and they knew how to feed on it. He was way better than that.

“We should call your boss,” Vladimir went on, prying Y/N away from her door until she stood by his side. “Ask him what he thinks of his dog being in heat with  _my_  hacker. I think he would not like it. Do you?” He turned his head towards Y/N and stared into her wide eyes as he let her keys fall into her palm.

The other man swallowed, fists tightening. “ _Your_  hacker?”

“ _Da_. Chick works for me now. I give you five seconds before I take gun and empty magazine in your ass. It’s been long night and we still have work to do.”

Wesley stood there for a couple of seconds staring at Vladimir, fuming, trying to find a loophole in Fisk’s orders that would allow him to kill the Russian without getting killed in turn. “Very well, then. I’ll see you at the meeting next week.”

It felt like a threat, but as Vladimir stared as that dog got into the elevator to leave the building, he found himself not giving a shit. He didn’t give a damn about Y/N either. He admired her, sure: she seemed strong and she stood up to him–he didn’t exactly like that: he wanted her to do what he told her to, but at least she was no coward. And while he hated the fact that she was a spy and he - her target, one still needed to have guts of steel to spy on mobsters like him and his brother, and her courage–or was it stupidity?–was admirable. Still, he wasn’t going to admit to himself–let alone to anyone else–that he almost considered her his equal.

“Thank you.” She was touching him again, her fingers were lightly brushing against his.

But he couldn’t take his hand away, couldn’t show her his weakness. He hadn’t been touched in forever, not in a way that mattered, at least. He knew what kind of touches he had to expect from whores, knew part of them was afraid of him and that therefore they would never do anything to piss him off. But with other people, it was different. This wasn’t Tolya patting his back, and not even the rare client that insisted on shaking his hand. This was someone else, someone he didn’t really know. It was a  _woman_  and the feathery brush of her skin against his filled him with fear.

Last time he trusted a woman, he…

“I was hoping you would stay downstairs, though,” she continued, finally interrupting the contact–and the train of his thoughts. Vladimir could breathe again. “You never know it with people like James.”

“Or like you.”

She scoffed as she inserted the key in the lock of her door, but as she wore her usual iron mask, he still saw her shoulders sag. “I thought I finally had the chance to prove you I’m not against you.”

“You have to work for it, I don’t trust blindly.”

He didn’t wait for her to answer: he opened the door to his apartment and swiftly closed it behind his back. His actions had been so quick that her “Then why don’t you-” remained without an end–or an answer.

She stood there in the corridor for a while–he saw her from the peephole–before she turned around and entered her home.

It was surely that for her. Her home. New and still a little foreign maybe, but home nonetheless, he was certain of that.

She would have let Wesley in, otherwise, he reasoned. She would have let him in, offered him the drink he had asked for and he would have done his best to slip into her bed.

Tolik was usually the one who could read people and he was pretty good at it. Volodya, on the other hand, was better with facts and actions, but lust was lust from any point of view you looked at it and he knew Wesley had it hard for her.

Did she get wet for him, too, though?

But he didn’t care. He stepped in because he had read her discomfort–or at least that had to be the reason why his brain and his good sense had failed him. And he  _truly_  did not like it when someone harassed his people: he needed them in great shape for the kind of job they had to do. He needed them unbothered, they had to feel safe.

Even someone like her.

He had promised her he’d give her a chance, a chance to gain his trust and show him that she was indeed on his side. And he…

No. He hadn’t wanted to honor his promise. Wesley could want to fuck her all he wanted and she could choose whether she wanted to open her legs for him or not. But she had seen him standing there, watching the scene like a voyeur. She had probably deserved more than a shitty boss at that moment, with the unwanted fingers of another man trailing down her cheek. She worked for him now and whether he wanted it or not, her well-being now leaned against him like that of any one of his men.

Yes, that had to be the reason.

*

Days flew by and before any of them knew it, it was time to meet Fisk’s bootlicker. Vladimir couldn’t wait to tell him the shipment had gone to shit and that his girl hadn’t managed to do anything to stop it.

Ha!

If he put his annoyance to the side, the whole situation was almost comical. He was given what had been advertised as the ‘key to success,’ and his first meeting with a client ever since Y/N had started to work at the garage flopped. And it flopped  _hard_. The only good thing in that mess was that Dobos’ organization was too weak to try any bad and risky move. At least, all he had to worry about was still Wesley’s dog spying on him.

But he… He was probably starting to like her.  _As a person_ , that is. Sentiments weren’t involved, he kept on telling himself: he wasn’t going to do that shit with a woman and risk dying again.

The news was, she had turned down Piotr’s advances and sexual innuendos like she did just that for a living and his face still contorted into a smirk anytime he thought back to Petya’s disappointed expression–with a pretty face like his, he wasn’t used to being turned down or to have to sweat it for a girl, which made it all the more amusing. He still wondered what had paralyzed her in front of James Wesley, though, and it had become his personal hobby: to try and find out what had happened between the two of them.

“What’s on your mind?” Tolik was fixing his shirt, staring at himself in the mirror above the sink, and he was grinning at his own thoughts.

Volodya shrugged his shoulders, quickly drying his hands before throwing the paper towels into the bin. “Nothing important.”

And it truly wasn’t–Wesley banging his new hacker, that is. It had been his constant thought ever since that night outside Y/N’s apartment, though. He didn’t even know why, but he craved that information: what happened? The weasel couldn’t fuck well? Or was he a creep in the sheets? That information could come in handy–if not for his own personal amusement, at least for some sort of fucked-up blackmail.

“I hope you’re not planning on ditching us to avoid the club,” Anatoly spoke up after a while, contented with how the collar of his shirt hid the hickeys on his neck.

Vladimir grimaced. “Clubs are not my thing.”

“Don’t care, you’d better come. Paulina wants to see you, she hasn’t met you in forever. She wants to make sure you’re still alive and well.”

“I’ll call her.”

“You won’t because you’re coming. And you know who else is?”

Vladimir shrugged. He didn’t care, he was still going to find a way to go straight back home. Clubs weren’t his thing, human contact in places like the one he had to go to tonight wasn’t his thing. Alcohol wasn’t his thing either, not anymore, not when he was surrounded by other people, at least. His mother had used to say alcohol was a truth serum: it brought the real person to the surface and erased the mask. Or at least that was the excuse she hid behind when his father beat her.

And whether too much vodka truly brought reality onto the stage or not, he wasn’t going to get drunk with other people. He could sit in a circle jerk and enjoy his time, but the same wasn’t going to happen when drinks were involved. He wasn’t like that, he wasn’t the thing he turned into when he…

Denial was still better than facing the truth and the truth were the monsters hiding in the darkness of his mind, waiting for him to let his walls down even for just a second to come out and eat him alive.

“Y/N is coming,” his brother continued just as he opened the door.

His back tensed, his squared shoulders drew back, chest puffing out a little. “One more reason not to come.”

“I thought things were good now.”

“I’m going to tell you what I told her, brother: she has to sweat for my trust.”

Tolik’s head tilted to the side as he crossed his arms on his chest. “You can’t keep on doing this, though.”

“I’m not doing anything.”

A scoff. “You’re putting her through hell just because… I don’t even know why. Why would Fisk want to ruin us when we refill his pockets with good money? You’re making her job impossible. If you had listened to her when she tried to talk some sense into you when we were getting ready to meet the Hungarians, probably it wouldn’t have been a flop.”

“So now it’s my fault? What’s up with you? You letting her suck you off? Is this why you’re always taking her sides?”

Anatoly took a step forward, forefinger pressing into his brother’s chest. “I’m nobody’s puppet,  _brother_. I simply try to look beyond the here-and-now to see if we can gain anything from her working with us.”

“ _For_  us.”

“ _With_  us. She’s still Fisk’s propriety until we draw her to our side. Behave. Let her do her job. Stop giving her shit. After the meeting, we go to the club, you’ll greet my fucking woman and she will help us tear the truth out of Y/N. If she’s up to something, I’ll apologize, but if we have nothing to worry about, you’ll step aside and be  _decent_  with her.”

Vlad was on the point of telling his brother that Y/N had indeed been ordered to spy on them, but he kept his mouth shut. He thought he knew what Tolya was planning, how they were going to make her spill the truth, and all he had to do was wait. Wait for her to betray her cover and show his brother how fucking right he was. “Fine.”

*

The meeting with Wesley went by faster than usual and Vladimir thought he knew why. The doormat had kept on eyeing Y/N who, for the sake of everyone’s safety, had been introduced as Fisk’s new personal assistant, someone high up enough to be able to attend those business meetings. She had been forced to stand near Wesley and the Russians had agreed–Vladimir with a little help from Anatoly because while he was a stubborn dick who still didn’t trust her, he didn’t want Wesley to think he could do as he pleased with what now belonged to  _him_.

She was  _his_  fucking hacker, not Wesley’s, not even Fisk’s. And she was so regardless of whether or not he was fond of her.

But as Gao showed her numbers and introduced the name of a new big customer from outside the city, Wesley’s gaze slowly walked up Y/N’s legs, her skin masked by the black semi-transparent tights she wore under her burgundy skirt. And Vladimir saw everything: the slight twitch in the weasel’s jaw, the way his fingers tapped away at his thigh, even the way his chest leaned forward, his ass pushing back on the chair because the crotch of his suit pants had suddenly become uncomfortable.

He could use her, Vlad thought. Use her against him and then against Fisk. If only he could put his hesitation and doubts to the side, if only he could see her as a person and not a profession… If only ‘attractive woman’ meant something different to him than what it  _did_  mean, then he was sure he could have the world, for he would maneuver her to give it to him.

“Hungarians are out of scene,” Anatoly was saying when Vladimir’s eyes met Y/N’s. “Will not hear from them anymore.” He wasn’t ashamed to say the deal had sunk–and it was better that way: with Dobos out of the picture, they had one less enemy on the chessboard of power.

But Volodya wasn’t thinking about it. He was staring into that girl’s eyes, his brother’s words from that afternoon echoing back and forth among his noisy thoughts. The benefit of the doubt he had given her was bullshit, it had been a plain lie. Or so he thought– _hoped_. But now, with her eyes set on him, he felt like she could read him, like she could read  _inside_  of him. Every fear and every memory, every scar, every tattoo, every  _murder_ , starting from Tatyana. Tatyana, whose curves he could see in Y/N, whose stubbornness he could see in Y/N, whose  _insolence_  he could see in Y/N.

And that was exactly why he didn’t trust her– _couldn’t_  trust her. Physical appearance aside, Tanya and Y/N were two drops of blood. And if the former had managed to shatter him, what could stop the latter from doing the same?

Anatoly wanted to give her a chance, though, and he wondered if his brother had truly forgotten their past. Maybe Paulina had done some juju shit and now Tolik didn’t even know who Tatyana was anymore. Or maybe he didn’t see it as his own fault, maybe he thought it had all happened because of Vladimir. Their fall, the cage, their servitude to some American dick. All of it–Vladimir’s fault.

As the meeting came to an end, Vladimir too lost in his own thoughts to even be able to tell what it all was about, he reasoned he didn’t want to know the truth.  _Y/N’s_  truth. Because it was true, it had all happened because of him, and he didn’t want to be the cause of their fall once again.

*

Sergei had finally joined them at the club, some stuffed and noisy shithole Anatoly’s woman had chosen, and Vladimir let himself heave a sigh. Seriozha had always been on his side, he had always had his back like a brother, he had-

He was kissing her cheek and she was grinning, hugging him with one arm as she held a shot of vodka in the other hand. She yelled something in his ear so that he could hear her above the music–and that was the same reason why nobody else managed to hear a word–and he laughed back, pinching her side as he sat on the leather couch with her on one knee.

Vladimir frowned.

How was it that his men liked her? Couldn’t they see? Couldn’t they  _understand_?

First, it had been Tolya: let’s trust her, let’s agree with Fisk, let’s bring her to the garage. Second, it had been Petya, whom he had overheard one night saying how he wanted to bang her in any possible position, how he wanted her to suck him  _dry_. And now Seriozha, his marble Sergei.

What did she have that he couldn’t see? Tits? Check. Ass? Check. And had it only been Piotr, he would have stopped there, for he knew too well that his brother only had eyes for Paulina. Which, by the way,  _go figure_! He had never been with a woman for more than a week in Russia, but after moving to New York and having spent nights fucking whore, he finds this Pole and he…  _settles down?_  On what planet?

But Sergei. That was another story. If Sergei was acting like this, all giddy and handsy in public, it meant she had something else, something she hadn’t shown him or that he hadn’t picked up yet. Or maybe they were simply fucking. Which was… impossible. He had never seen  _nor_  heard Sergei enter or leave her apartment, just like she stayed at home every night. And he wasn’t a stalker– _at all!_ –, he just had a pretty light and short sleep.

He stared as she downed the shot of vodka and tried not to laugh at something Piotr said from next to her so as not to spit the alcohol, but a droplet still escaped the corner of her lips and-

_And Sergei licked it away._

Vladimir squinted, brows furrowing, breath stopping. He clearly saw Seriozha’s tongue slip out from his smiling lips and lick away the drop of burning vodka from the left corner of her mouth. And that was…

Either he had been drugged and he was tripping–and tripping  _badly_ –, or there was something wrong going on with  _Sergei_. Because that… Holy shit, that was  _a fucking first!_

“See? Everybody likes Y/N!” Tolya yelled in his ear, tickling his brother’s skin with his warm breath.

Yeah, apparently everyone but him was stupid enough to chase after her.


	8. The Truth in The Details

“She’s a nice guy,” Sergei was saying. He had moved to sit next to Vladimir and was absentmindedly staring at the drink in his hand.

“She’s a nice…  _guy_?”

“Yeah, you know what I mean.” The man shrugged, gaze scanning the crowd. He burst out laughing when he saw Piotr and Semyon dance like idiots, but then turned his attention back to Vladimir and returned his serious self when he saw his friend hadn’t even smiled. “She could even be  _Bratva_.”

“ _Bratva_?”

To say Vladimir was shocked was an understatement.  _Bratva_  was a serious thing, more serious than family, stronger than blood. While Y/N was… Aside from the few things they already knew about her, she was basically a stranger. They didn’t know where she was born, who her family was, where she studied, what she could do. Being siblings, being father and son,  _relatives_ –being bound by blood didn’t make you part of the  _Bratva_ , for it went far beyond that. And she…

“She could never be that,” he groaned through gritted teeth, staring as said girl danced with Paulina.

_She could never be Bratva_. The mere thought felt insane. He could understand giving people a chance to prove their worth, but this… This was far beyond what he was willing to do with her. She could become a well-respected coworker, a tolerable neighbor. A friend? Probably. But never… never  _that_.

“Did you know she used to work in Kharkiv?”

Vladimir’s head snapped to the side so fast that pain shot up the back of his neck until it reached his left temple. “Ukraine?”

He had used to have contacts there before his reign in Moscow fell. Pavlichenko was still ruling the city–or at least, that was what he had heard. Vasyl had been a good ally in the months they had worked together, but he had disappeared into thin air when Anatoly and he had been robbed of their power. The man hadn’t lent a hand, hadn’t reached out. As a matter of fact, he hadn’t done anything to help them somehow.

Sergei nodded and after a few seconds of contemplation, he finally downed his drink. “For two years. Now that I think about it, that’s probably why she speaks Russian with a Ukrainian accent…”

“She speaks Russian?”

“Fairly well.” There was another nod of Seriozha’s head before the man grinned. “Petya says she’s even better at it after a couple of drinks.” He shrugged. “I thought you knew.”

“No, I didn’t.”

He should have looked her up. He should have dug into her past to get to know her better, to find her weaknesses to be able to take advantage of them in case he ever needed to do so.

_Mistake number one_.

The same had happened with Tatyana. He had thought her to simply be a good-looking woman with great tits and an even greater mouth. But that had still been the start of his demise. He had allowed her to sneak her way under his skin, lull him into the safety of her embrace, just to then stab his heart from behind.

How did he end up doing the same mistake with Y/N?

He didn’t know. He had promised himself he’d be more careful so that he wouldn’t make a false move, and yet…

_Yet_ , she spoke Russian and it put any conversation he or his men had ever had at the garage at risk–at a risk so fucking high he couldn’t see its end.

_Yet_ , she had started to slip into his men’s hearts. Two had already fallen, possibly three if he counted Tolik; the others were risking the same fate.

_Yet_ , he hadn’t researched a single thing about her. He had taken her as Wesley had delivered her, he had kept his mouth shut–unless he had to yell at her, that is–and he had allowed her the benefit of the doubt.

“What else do you know about her?” he found himself asking. His gaze had zeroed in on Y/N, who was now drinking at the bar with Paulina and Piotr, and as he watched the three of them talk and laugh, he had to resist the urge to spring to his feet, march down to her and  _fucking choke_  her.

Sergei didn’t answer: he restricted himself to shrug his shoulders before he leaned against the back of the two-seat couch in what was the quietest area of the club.

“Did she work for Pavlichenko?”

“She did.” There was a sigh then, but Vladimir didn’t hear it, not above the music and the thundering of blood in his brain.

“Why did she leave?” You didn’t just leave Kharkiv alive if you knew Pavlichenko’s secrets. It didn’t work like that, not under Vasyl’s watch, not with the brutes he had by his side.

“You should… you should ask her.” He had already spilled too much, Sergei. There was no oath behind his silence, he hadn’t promised Y/N anything and she hadn’t forbidden him to talk about it. Sergei Yurchenko was smart enough to know which people to trust with such a piece of information–that was exactly why Vladimir (and consequently, Anatoly) trusted him so much. But a look at his boss’ angered expression and all he wanted to do, was to become invisible.

Vlad snickered, lightening a cigarette despite it being forbidden. “She wouldn’t tell me and you know it. And I want to hear this from you before I get her drunk and see if she told you the truth.”

There was a long silence, then. The two men stared into each other’s eyes as Vladimir smoked and Sergei fidgeted with his fingers. “She apparently helped him hunt his brother down,” the latter eventually said. “She got Mikhail out of  _Beliy Lebed_ , somehow brought him back to Kharkiv and… Well, his brother killed him.”

“And after that, he let her go?”

Sergei shrugged. “That’s all I know. From what she told Piotr, that’s what happened.”

Vladimir had his doubts. Vasyl wasn’t that much older than him, but he had always been way more attentive when women were involved, much more than he himself had ever been. Rumor had it, he killed his first wife, the one he had married at eighteen years old, just because she had looked at his brother the wrong way once. And while Y/N was a nice and pretty view, one doesn’t simply let go of such a chirping bird.

“She said anything about how he found her?”

“Vacation. She went to Kiev when she dropped out of college, she was found snooping around a contact Pavlichenko had there, and she was brought to Kharkiv.”

“Sounds like a bunch of lies.”

*

Anatoly’s girlfriend was better than Y/N had expected. She had taken her time to learn a couple of things about her, but since she wasn’t directly involved in his man’s business, she hadn’t snooped too deep. There was already way too much to remember about the Ranskahovs and his men for there to be room for details about someone else, and this was what made tonight good, for she could get to know her.

Paulina was fun–and surprisingly nice. She was better than she had thought a criminal’s woman to be if she had to be honest, and while Anatoly was on a completely different level than the pain in her ass Vladimir was, it was a confusingly weird and nice contrast to how she had feared her to be. The young woman was outgoing and the best company Y/N had had in ages.

“So, I hope Tolya is treating you well at work,” she smiled when Piotr followed a brunette to dance. They both stared as he unabashedly flirted with her, Russian accent even thicker after all the alcohol he had already drunk, and they snickered when he tried to grope her ass.

“Oh, Anatoly is treating me alright,” Y/N answered, finishing her water. She didn’t want to get drunk, not yet–she wanted to convince herself the reason was her will to enjoy the night, for she was under the impression that she wasn’t going to be invited out again anytime soon, but the truth was, she didn’t want to give Vladimir the chance to…  _To do anything_ , to be honest, and ‘anything’ was a broad term. “He’s not the problem.”

“Volodya is?”

“He’s… stubborn.”

“Of course he is, he’s a Ranskahov! Anatoly is just better at hiding it, but you should see him at home.” Paulina chuckled, leaning back against the bar and looking for her man with smiling eyes. “When he wants to do something, there’s no way to stop him from doing it.”

“How are they?” Y/N wanted her to talk, to say anything she wanted because she needed a way to not focus on Vladimir staring at her from the secluded corner he and his friends had chosen for them to sit and drink–and probably to hide her corpse better if it ever did come to that.

“I’m sure you already know quite a bit.” There was a mischievous glint in her eyes as she stared down at her. And while her gaze wasn’t frightening–nothing could ever be, not after having met Vladimir Ranskahov–, it was still something to worry about. “C’mon, don’t play coy. Tolya told me what you do for them–the same you used to do for… what’s his name? Wesley?” She chuckled then, and had she meant it to be playful or something else, Y/N didn’t know. “You’re a hacker! And that’s a damn interesting thing, don’t feel like you have to hide it from me.”

“I’m not hiding it, it’s just not something you go yelling around in a public space.” She smiled, too, and in the attempt to avoid her burning stare, she turned in Vladimir’s direction once again. “And it’s like… You know, like spilling the truth after you’ve been snooping around.”

Luckily enough, though, Vlad wasn’t looking at her, focused as he was on something Sergei’s was saying.

“Let’s do a game, then.” Paulina was smoothing her hands against the black denim of her jeans. “For every detail I get right, you tell me something you know about me–just me, no one else involved.”

Y/N didn’t turn her head, she simply glanced at the Pole next to her from the corner of her eye and gulped. There was something in her–something in the delicate features of her face, in the light brown hair turned blonde under the lights of the club, something in the way her jeans hugged her legs and in the way Anatoly’s leather jacket sagged on her shoulders that… It was like standing next to a snake, hoping it wouldn’t feel threatened so as not to get bitten.

She didn’t want to think like that, she had just met her and being the only woman closely tied to the Ranskahovs’ business, she had hoped they could bond somehow, but… The feeling that Paulina was just like James was there, at the back of her throat, and she had to do her damndest to swallow and avoid gagging.

“Okay,” she agreed after a few more minutes, slowly nodding her head up and down, turning her attention to Piotr in the hopes he’d come to her rescue.

“Great! Let’s start with something easy, then.” Paulina’s excitement glimmered in her eyes when she turned towards her and there was something in her smirk that had a shiver run down her spine. “Your father was a criminal. He killed the right man and got his place. He killed the wrong man and lost everything, forced you and your mommy to move to the east coast.”

It wasn’t the whole truth, but it was still unsettling. “How do you-”

But Paulina interrupted her, tutting at her and lifting her chin with a smile. “I uncover a secret, you do the same.”

Y/N swallowed hard. Suddenly, her mouth had gone dry, her throat was threatening to close up. She wiggled on her stool, smiled at an approaching guy just for that smile to fade soon after when he passed her to go to the restroom.

Sure, her past wasn’t a secret, but it was still something she wasn’t going to talk about–she never had with anyone and she probably never will in the future. And to have someone she barely knew– _someone she hadn’t spent enough time studying_ –come up with part of her father’s story was… unexpected. And unwelcome.

Probably that was how Vladimir felt, she reasoned. And why he despised her so much.

But the suddenness of that revelation froze her. And the revelation wasn’t just that Paulina knew something about her dad, but that she–or someone else for her–had spent time searching her past and her story and…

And she couldn’t come up with anything. Her brain had stopped working and the only image she could think of–but not delete–was her father’s bloodied face  _that_  night.

“Come on, just tell me the basics,” Paulina pressed her, nudging her shoulder with hers.

“You are…” Y/N stopped, tongue sleepy and heavy. “You worked for the United Nations. In France.”

“That’s right. But I had to stop and resign. I mean, being in a relationship with a criminal and all… It felt like cheating.”

Y/N chuckled, more out of nervousness than of amusement. She wanted Vladimir to be there, to yell at her, even to manhandle her because she kept on bugging him about doing things her way so that she didn’t have to continue that game.

“Someone else found out about your past,” were the woman’s next words, “and proposed a way for you to buy his silence.”

What had happened  _then_  wasn’t exactly a secret either. Some people at work had found out and while their fear had been far too great for them to go around talking about it, they still found a way to spread some vague rumor.

“Sex is the currency of the weak,” Paulina whispered in her ear. “And people like James Wesley are particularly weak. They have a façade of stone, but there’s no lion behind it, just a snake.”

The woman’s lips brushed against her earlobe as she spoke, aggravating  _everything_. Scary wasn’t the fact that she somehow  _knew_. It was the thought that she could use those things against her–or that the Russians could use them. And it wasn’t some ‘it’s gonna get you killed’ secret, for the truth laid in the details Paulina didn’t know, in the little things she had left behind, in the little things she had done to the people that had ended her family–right when her story had started. She had tipped off Pavlichenko in Ukraine, sold information to Kiev, and she was looking for the best and safest way to do the same to Fisk.

The Russians… They were just a setback, something that slowed her down. They had done nothing to her and she had done nothing to them–there was no reason for a war to start. The only problem was that Vladimir didn’t trust her and his paranoid caution could cause even more trouble than it was needed.

“He’s still coming back for more, isn’t he?”

She didn’t answer. It was clear that Paulina had her ways to find out part of the truth, most of all when the safety of the people she loved was involved.

“Cat got your tongue?”

“Not your business, I can handle my business pretty well.” She hadn’t meant for her reply to come out that harsh, but she still hoped the other changed the subject of the conversation or shut up altogether.

“I just want to help you,” Paulina retorted. She had grabbed her shoulder and had turned her so that they were face to face. “If there’s someone threatening you, they’re threatening Anatoly and Vladimir’s business and lives, too.”

“Wesley won’t do anything, our employer wouldn’t-”

“ _Your employers_  are the Ranskahovs now. Forget about your old job, you’re with us now.”

“I appreciate your interest, but-”

“God, Tolya was right!” Paulina groaned, massaging her forehead with index and middle fingers. “You’re just as stubborn as Vladimir.”

It stung like an insult, even if Y/N knew the other was just stating the truth–or, rather, her and Anatoly’s truth. And yeah, she could be stubborn, but  _not_  Vladimir-stubborn. This was just her private life and what happened behind its doors was her business–hers and no one else’s. “I’ll let you know if I ever need any help, okay?”

And she wasn’t going to do that, not even if her own life was at stake, for asking for help meant confessing, and confessing meant risking what her father had faced when things went to shit. And she didn’t want her things to go to shit. She was still young and wanted to live a long, undisturbed life once the people that had to die were dead.

“On another note, how are things with Vladimir going at work?” The tone of her voice had already changed and was now lighter. Even the look in her eyes wasn’t the same as before: it was friendly now and slowly, the more she stared at her, the more her fear melted away.

“They’re  _not_  going.”

Paulina chuckled and was about to say something when she spotted Anatoly calling for her with a gesture of the hand. “Remember what I know. See you later,” were her last words before she left her alone.

She should have definitely spent more time studying that woman.

*

Anatoly had told him to go get Y/N drunk and Vladimir had accepted–against his will and his better judgment, but he had accepted. There was nothing else he could do, not when one word from Paulina could force him to bend down. So, he waited for his brother to sit down with his woman before he stood up and made his way towards the bar.

He wanted it to be quick and sudden like the removal of a band-aid–make her drink, hope his mother’s words about alcohol were a universal truth even on the other side of the world, and take mental notes of what she told him. It sounded so simple and yet, he knew she wasn’t going to give in so easily. She was just as stubborn as he was, head carved out of stone.

But he wanted to feel safe, to stop checking his own back. And he wanted his men to be safe, too: they could become friends with her all they wanted, they could do anything they wished to and with her, but she had no right to bend and manipulate Sergei like that.

“Vodka,” he ordered when he sat on the stool previously taken by Paulina. “One for her,” he added, pointing at Y/N with a tilt of his head.

He was tired. All of a sudden, the weight of that day–of the seven previous days, if he wanted to be  _that_  precise–had crashed down onto his shoulders and the thought of having to make her confess felt like a nightmare.  _She_  was a nightmare, plaguing his every waking thought.

“I’ve already drunk enough, but thank you.”

The politeness in her smile was as fake as the benefit of the doubt he had given her, and they both knew it. However, none of them seemed to care. They didn’t need to be friends to understand each other because they weren’t that different, after all.

“Is rude to refuse.” He pushed a shot under her nose and glared at her until she picked the glass between rigid fingers. “Drink.”

“Or what?”

His hand gripped her knee and he pressed closer to her. She smelled nice, he noticed. He didn’t know what it was, but it was the same perfume that had followed his mother around the house when he had been a kid–it had always meant safety back then, and almost unwillingly, he found himself hoping it still meant that. “I said, drink.”

She shivered when his nose brushed against the shell of her ear and he felt that.

“Now you.” Her voice trembled and he had to force himself not to grin–or grimace. It was just one drink, after all, nothing that could get him even remotely tipsy. He needed far more than a shot of vodka to lose himself, but he still didn’t want to run the risk.

He lifted his glass in a cheering gesture before he drank the burning liquor, eyes fixed on hers. He didn’t break that eye contact when he put the shot back down onto the bar and not even when the bartender refilled them–it had all been planned and already generously paid for.

“I know what you’re trying to do,” she nodded after a while, lowering her gaze on the shot in front of her. Her fingers traced its rim, her nails slightly dipped into the vodka.

“Oh,  _da_?”

“You want to know stuff about me, see if you can trust me or if I’m trying to ruin you.” That was probably why Paulina had come up with that short-lived game: either to prepare her for Vladimir’s attempt or to find out more about her. “There’s no need to get me drunk.”

“Alcohol does not lie,” he retorted, forcing her to drink her shot with a glance. “But you can, if you are sober.”

“Faith means trusting someone even when they’re sober.”

“I don’t want to run more risks.”

“I warned you Wesley was waiting for me last week. I could have just kept my mouth shut so that he could find out where you live. You still decided not to listen to me, and that’s okay, I mean, it’s your business. But I warned you, expecting nothing in return.”

She was right and he knew it. The problem was, he was scared. He was fucking  _terrified_  of putting his life in this girl’s hands for her to do what she pleased with it. His natural gift with people had abandoned him after Tatyana’s betrayal and now he never knew how to act, what to do, what to say.

And it didn’t matter that she might be on the verge of telling him the truth, because that scared him way more than her lies. It could be a trap: get him to trust her just to then get him killed–him and Tolya and Seriozha and Petya and everyone else. He had been the cause of the deaths of many of his friends and there was no way he was going to risk that again.

That was the reason why whatever she said was going to meet his brick wall.

“Maybe you just wanted to tell him things you shouldn’t have.” He wasn’t… He wasn’t going to trust her. He could, of course: he could open up enough to let her in and he could be honest with her, think of her the way Sergei or even Piotr thought of her, but…  _But_  he didn’t want to let anyone down. Not again.

_Tolik wants to give her second chance_.

And so he was battled between giving her just that like his brother wanted and keep on doing it his way, closing her out, coming up with obstacles to place between him and her to stop her from getting closer–and to stop  _himself_  from getting closer to her.

“I would have already done that, Vladimir.”

She was tired–was it because of the long day or because of his behavior, Vladimir would never know. And against his better judgment, he almost stretched his hand out to touch her furrowed brow, trace its line down to her cheekbone and then down to her lips. Had she looked different, he probably would have done that. But she had Tatyana’s tired grimace, the same tilt in her chin as she looked up at the ceiling to exhale loudly from her nose.

“Who guarantees me this?”

“I guess this is what trusting people means, just like I trusted you not to shoot me when you and your brother killed the Hungarians.”

He stared at her, tried to tear Tanya from her features. He focused on the shape of her lips, tried to tell himself they weren’t like Tatyana’s. And the more he stared, the more details he noticed, like that faint scar just above her upper lip.

The next thought passed his mind like a meteor: he wanted to kiss it.

“You tell me what you did for Pavlichenko in Kharkiv and I will think about it.”

She smirked. “If you know about Pavlichenko, it means you already know what I did for him.”

“I want you to tell me truth. You might have lied to Piotr.”

“I didn’t lie,” she shrugged and downed his untouched drink. “And I know that telling you about Ukraine won’t fix anything between us. But I can tell you something else, something I never told anyone.”

“How will I know if you lie?”

“Jesus, Vladimir! I’m doing my best here, but you have to meet me halfway there!”

He groaned and she stared until he nodded in defeat. “Fine. What is it?”

“The reason why I went to Ukraine in the first place,” she smirked.


	9. Secrets and Truths

It could have all been a lie, Vladimir knew this. But the way she had spoken, the way she had  _confessed_ , almost like it cost her everything she had… It had kept him awake on Friday night, and then on the next one, too.

He hadn’t said a word to Tolik– _yet_. He had avoided his calls and his messages and when his brother had finally gone quiet, he had started to think that maybe he was doing the wrong thing. The thing was, he didn’t know what to do. There had been a subtle non-said at the club when she had spilled her truth, almost as though that had to be a secret, at least for now. And while Vladimir  _knew_  he had to tell his brother, he didn’t know if  _now_  was the right time. Y/N’s story was far from over, and he didn’t know how he knew this, but he felt it in his bones: there was more she had to say and he wasn’t willing to risk his chance.

Moreover, he wanted this to be his upper hand, the loophole he could use to escape death and imprisonment. He had told her so, at the club, and that had maybe been his first admission of honesty in a long, long time. And what had surprised him hadn’t been the lack of anger on her part, but rather her agreeing with his choice. She had given him permission to use that information against her if he deemed it necessary and now that he was allowed to follow through with his plan in case things went in the wrong direction, he found himself being hesitant.

He had burned the element of surprise, that much was for sure, he thought as he stared outside the window of his room, elbows resting against the cool windowsill as he smoked yet another cigarette. It was getting out of control, his smoking, but it was either that or going back to being swallowed by his demons and therefore to being Y/N’s personal torment.

They had agreed on that, too. They were going to bury the hatchet and give each other a chance–for real, this time. No more games, no more arguments, no more secrets. She was going to tell him everything she knew about him and she was going to tell him everything about herself so that they could be even–and it was all going to happen in due time, of course. And sure, he wanted to know what she was hiding, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear the story of his life from her.

He had to, though. They had agreed on that, for he had to be completely honest with her, too, if he wanted things to work.

And it was all hardcore trusting once again. And he was scared of trusting her, of falling for her, of developing something more than simple respect for her because he was already on that dangerous path  _and fuck!_  How could he not be, though? Even Sergei had found something in her and he knew that if they both gave each other a chance, Seriozha would like to go beyond friendship with that girl–just like Piotr, but Piotr was another story.

But Y/N was brave–and probably a little out of her mind. It took both things to have the guts to work with people like him–or with people like Pavlichenko, for that matter. And one didn’t simply acquire those traits just because daddy was an undercover fed in the charter of a one-percenter club. Something else must have happened, he reasoned, and may he be damned if he wasn’t going to find out what that was.

She was also beautiful and his body knew that even if his mind did all it could to find just the negative things in her. And it wasn’t just that he felt drawn to her the way he had felt drawn to Tatyana. There was something more, something he couldn’t put his finger on, not yet, and it had probably come up after she had told him her story. And whatever it was, Tanya hadn’t had it–and had she been still alive, he wasn’t sure she had what it took to get to that point in life.

Wesley probably had his part in it–in Vladimir’s fascination towards Y/N. Vladimir probably hadn’t consciously noticed her before he had found Fisk’s dog drooling all over her–and before he had seen her refuse his advances. She hadn’t pushed him away the way she had refused Piotr. There was something underneath all that tension between the two that he still hadn’t unearthed despite his best attempts. And while he still wanted to know the truth, it had taken him the scene he had witnessed in the corridor outside the elevator for him to truly  _see_  her.

He saw the way she grimaced when he pissed her off just as he saw the way her sweatshirts or blouses outlined her figure. He saw the way she walked, the way her hips swayed, the way she dropped like a sack of potatoes onto the couch he had in his office, huffing because he wouldn’t stop giving her a hard time.

And he had seen her legs through the see-through tights on Friday, had seen the way her skirt clung to her sides, the way her heels highlighted her shins. And he was still thinking about her the way he was sure Wesley thought of her in his spare time, too. And while he didn’t want to admit this much, he craved that.

He probably craved that more for the same reason he had spent weeks despising her. There was a clever brain behind those glasses and while he never wanted to agree with her, he knew she wasn’t stupid, that she knew what was best and what wasn’t. And he found himself thinking about her not because his mind went back to Tanya, but because his mind went back to  _how he felt_  when he had Tanya. And it reminded him of how he was, and of what he had turned into in that dark cell, of the monsters that still crawled behind him, hiding in his shadow. And he had seen those same shadows in her eyes, he had felt the same dripping coldness of his monsters in her voice when she had finally opened up.

Far more than he could want her as a person, he wanted her for her past, for what she had done that had brought her here. He had seen himself in her when she had opened up to him–he hadn’t seen Tolya, who shared his same experiences; and not even Sergei, who had killed many a man; but himself. And only God knew how long he had waited for someone who could understand him, who could look at him and see all he couldn’t say– _all he couldn’t bring himself to say_ –, who could help him ease that weight.

It was dangerous, though, he thought as he put out the cigarette against the marble of the windowsill. What if it was just a trick? An illusion? And she was the complete opposite of him? And what if he opened up–bared himself to her, just to then be left there naked at his monsters’ mercy?

There was a knock on the door then and the sound was so foreign and sudden that it took him a while to realize that someone was indeed knocking at his door.

He was almost completely sure nothing like that had ever happened to him: Tolya had the keys to his apartment and could come and go as he pleased–as long as he respected Vlad’s spaces, of course–, and his men were free to walk into his office without knocking, for such formalities didn’t belong in his business. And for this reason, he was left hesitant by the person on the other side of the door.

He still crossed his bedroom, though, and then his bare living room to spy through the peephole. And when he saw who it was, he heaved a sigh.

He opened the door and it took him a couple of seconds to find his voice again.

“What do you want?”

*

Y/N had managed to convince Vladimir to get into her apartment, for it had been clear he wouldn’t let her into his own and she would never talk in the hallway, and now she could feel his eyes on the back of her head as she stared down at her hands.

Her father’s kutte weighed like a mountain and the more she stared at it, the more it seemed to drag her towards the floor.

“This was my father’s,” she said. “Full patch and all from when he was in the Barbarians.” She turned around, met Vladimir’s gaze–confused and almost wary–, but she wasn’t able to hold it, so she let her eyes wander back to the torn leather vest she had taken out from the bottom of her closet. “You said you wanted a proof that what I was saying was the truth, so here you have it. You can still see his blood in the spots I didn’t manage to remove it from.”

Vladimir hesitated.

He suddenly needed another cigarette. Sure, he had asked her for proof–he had trusted blindly too much before America and wasn’t going to take any risk now, not if he could avoid it. He had probably hoped to see her mask fall the moment he demanded she gave him something concrete, but now here she was, looking smaller than ever as he took the vest she was handing him.

There was indeed blood on its collar, it stained the ruined leather like a punch in an eye. “This - your father’s club?”

“No. It was  _my_  club. For him, it was just an MC he infiltrated into.” She still wasn’t looking at him, too lost in her Las Vegas memories.

“You promised you’ll tell me more.”

Both with his presence in her home and with his demands, he felt like an intruder. Only now he thought that he had no right to do this, to ask for this information. It didn’t matter that she had snooped in his past life–and in his present, too–, for she had spared him the pain of confessing what had happened. She had made things easy for him, she had taken what she needed without pestering him with questions, and now he was making things hard for her.

But he wasn’t her. He couldn’t do the things she could. Questions were his only means to get what he wanted–he could never use fists or guns on her. Threats–that he could do, but it didn’t feel right, not when he could get her killed with just one word.

Surprising both himself and her, he sat when she told him to and he held his breath for a heartbeat when he realized she was sitting right next to him. Last time they had been this close, he had forced her to drink vodka–probably against her will–so that he could tear the truth out of her. He had wanted that; he would have probably liked the idea of Anatoly having to deal with her better, but he had wanted her to spill her truth. And now that he was going to get what he wanted, all he felt was guilt.

“When I was a kid,” she started, “I didn’t know my dad worked for the FBI. He was just a mechanic to me, and my mom was just some English teacher. I grew up going to club barbeques and playing with members’ kids and we were just one big, happy family. Then, when my father’s cover blew up, we had to leave Nevada and our identities behind.” She chuckled. “I don’t even know what’s fake now: my current name or my old one?”

“You said one of Pavlichenko’s friends found out your father was federal,” he recalled. She had told him so in a whisper two nights before, at the club, and she had refused to look at him in the eye. He had believed her to be lying.

Y/N nodded. “Usyk. He got my father killed before we boarded the plane to leave the state.”

“He was drug lord.” Vladimir had heard of him, back in Moscow. Usyk had tried to gain land in Tula at the expenses of Smirnov but had given up when better opportunities arose in Kiev.

“He had contacts with Fisk; that’s why I work for him now.”

Vlad turned to look at her.

“I want to kill him. I want him gone–and I want Wesley gone, too. Pavlichenko should be on the way to his demise, too, after I unleashed him against Saint Petersburg. I’m sure you remember Petrov.” She was smiling, but her smile was cold, her eyes - empty. It was like staring at himself in the mirror in the morning, when all he could feel was a past that was never going to come back.

She was going to follow through with his intentions and he knew it. He had seen that same gaze on many people–and on himself, too. It was a blood-thirst so deep it couldn’t be stopped, it couldn’t be bluffed. It was there and it was true. And it was so heavy and hungry that it was going to eat you alive if you didn’t fulfill its desires.

He wanted to say something, and desperately so. But the more she gave him, the less he wanted. It was a defense mechanism and he knew it. He remembered Petrov just as he remembered Sokolovsky, his eternal friend-enemy in the control of the Russian capital. They had both had their fair share of guilt in his and his brother’s stay in Utkin.

“Usyk had heard there would be great deal chances in Nevada back then, years before I was born, and had struck a deal with the Barbarians. He would make sure his synthetic shit got into the country and the charter had to redistribute it and consequently, get richer. In exchange, the Barbarians had to protect Usyk’s most powerful allies in the region near Las Vegas.” She shrugged, absentmindedly brushing her knuckles against the worn leather of the kutte. “So, the FBI decided to come up with a long-term mission and my dad was one of the agents they infiltrated into the MC.”

“How did Usyk find out?” Part of him, the part that didn’t want to go back to his alcohol and cigarettes, wanted to know that: if he could avoid her father’s mistake, then he could save himself from her.

“Fisk.” He stared at her set jaw and at her closed eyes. She looked ten years older–probably the same way he looked when he went back to his golden past. “He was a small fish at the time, barely known in the underworld. He had ‘friends’ anywhere–people like me that spy on other people, on people like  _you_. Some of them got a whiff of what was going on and informed him, who in turn informed Usyk, who warned the Barbarians. Long story short, my father was a casualty.”

“I’m…” He didn’t know what he was.

“Sorry?” She chuckled, opening her eyes and turning her head against the seat back of the couch so that she could look at him. “Don’t be.”

Was he sorry, though? Probably not. But, at the same time, this was most likely the longest human contact he had had with someone outside of the garage  _in forever_ , and he truly didn’t know how to act.

“Is this enough or do you want more?” she asked. “Because remember, you’ll have to tell me some truths of yours one day.”

He snickered. He wasn’t going to do that: if she wanted something from him, she had to work hard–harder than she had worked to get Usyk killed–to get it. But then…

“Wesley.” The name had left his lips before he could stop himself. Whatever was between her and that man, it had been bugging him to no end ever since the previous week. She never acted with his men and their advances the way she had acted with Fisk’s dog. Piotr was still allowed to joke around her and she hadn’t been shy with him at the club: she had danced with him, jokingly kissed his cheek when the brunette he had been flirting with told him to go to hell, and she had let him smooch her face like a kid.

She frowned. “What about him?”

“Tell me what happened. At club you said you’ll answer my questions. This is my question now.”

“We…”

“Fucked.”

“Yeah. He knows who I am–who I  _really_  am, who I was before I came to New York with a new name. He probably thinks I still have ties with the feds, and also probably suspects I want to do something to our  _employer_ ,” she mocked Wesley. She massaged her eyes from underneath her glasses and heaved a sigh. “While this is personal and I’d rather you not know it, I also promised I’d tell the truth and I’m tired of you not trusting me when you’re literally the safest person around me. So, here it is: to buy his silence, he wanted sex. It honestly surprises me Paulina got this before-”

“She knows?”

“Somehow, yeah.”

It scared him that Paulina knew. Did she tell Anatoly, too?

“What’s matter with him?” he asked instead.

“He wants more,” she shrugged. She didn’t look at him; she simply stared at the switched-off television in front of her and the hand that had rested on her father’s leather until now snapped back down into her lap. “I’m not…” He stared as she swallowed and let her head fall backward. “I’m not exactly doing what I’m ordered to.”

“And what is it?”

“Reporting what you do.” She turned to look at him then and he had to repress a shiver at the serious expression on her face. “I should tell Wesley all your dirty secrets and while you never trust me, I have yet to tell him–or Fisk–a word.”

He knew she wasn’t lying, then. She kept on staring at him, almost as though she wanted to test  _him_ , and her position on the couch didn’t tense, it remained relaxed. “Why?”

“I don’t know. At first, it was because I wanted to get to know you and your brother, then because we were busy with your business…”

“And now?”

“I like you.” She cleared her voice, eyes running away from his. “I like you all, I mean. You seem like decent people despite the past you have. And you haven’t done anything wrong to me so far. My target is Fisk, after all, not the Ranskahovs and sure as hell not the guys at the garage.”

Vladimir nodded. He seemed to recall her telling him this much already, but he had been so busy worrying about what she might be doing and what she might do in the future, that he barely really listened to her.

“Now it’s my turn.”

He tensed and the leather vest in his lap seemed even heavier than it had felt to her.

“And I’m asking only because I didn’t find much on her.”

He knew who she was going to ask about, he felt it deep in his bones and in his whole being. There had only been one important woman in his life, and unless she wanted to ask about his dead mother, he was going to have to tell that story.

“Who’s Tatyana?”


	10. Three Days

It was Friday night and Vladimir was standing in front of the door of Y/N’s apartment, arms crossed and jaw clenched. He couldn’t believe it, couldn’t believe he had trusted that  _ bitch _ just to then be made fun of.

Against his better judgment, he had followed through with all that ‘benefit of the doubt’ bullshit–otherwise known as ‘fuck you, Anatoly’ neverending pile of crap–and had come to the conclusion that yes, he could try and trust her and that no, she was no threat, not an immediate one, at least.  _ And yet _ , the motherfucking spy disappeared on Wednesday and nobody saw her since.

There were alarm bells going off in Vlad’s brain and he hadn’t been able to shut them up yet. This was  _ exactly _ what he had feared and he hadn’t stopped to consider, not even for a second, that something might have been off. Sergei had been insisting on that eventuality, stressing his own worries on the case and Vladimir’s patience, too, and it hadn’t mattered that maybe Sergei was the one that knew her best, because Vladimir had already walked this lane and…

And it hadn’t ended well.

And what irked him the most was that she knew it– _ she knew it _ . He had told her when he told her Tatyana’s story through gritted teeth because he really,  _ really _ didn’t want to dig up that part of his past, because thinking about it was one thing while living it again through a confession was… not what he wanted, and this was saying the least.

The nerves she had… It was way beyond him.

Just then, there was a sudden  _ ding! _ when the elevator reached the floor and in the silence of the night he clearly heard the doors slide open. But he wasn’t staring in that direction. He had his gaze set on the door of his apartment and was doing his best to keep his cool. The truth was, it had never felt that impossible.

If this was how she proved his loyalty to him, then she had everything set wrong.

His ears barely picked up the whine coming from down the corridor, for all he heard inside his head was the infinite echo of an ‘I told you’. It was a motherfucking litany, one he couldn’t silence–not that he  _ wanted _ to, be it clear. Too bad he had left his packet of cigarettes in the car and didn’t want to risk missing her possible return home by entering his apartment to fetch another one.

“What are you doing in front of my door?” The voice that spoke to him was so weak that for a moment he thought he had simply imagined it. It sounded like it came straight out of the world of death.

He had thought about that moment so many times and with such an intensity, that he was sure she wouldn’t come home tonight, either–she was surely too busy being a spying bitch to remember that he held her life in his hands. And to suddenly hear that voice almost felt surreal.

But then, when he turned his head to the side, he found himself at a loss for words. He had waited for her on Wednesday and then on Thursday, the day prior, and she hadn’t shown up. Vladimir had stood in the middle of the corridor like an idiot for  _ hours _ , gained weird looks from the neighbor from down the corridor who had brought home a girl, but Y/N hadn’t marched out of the elevator like usual.

‘Fuming’ didn’t even start to explain how he felt. His headache stomped inside his head, his blood burned in his veins, the blunt edges of his nails cut into the hardened skin of his palms, and he knew, then and there, that he was on the verge of turning into something else. It was a burning stronger than what he had felt when he had faced Tatyana that day, stronger than the rage that had brought him out of that cell. And once again, it was all his fault– _ it was all his fault _ . How could he be so stupid to-

She had a black eye and a bruise on her jaw. It took him longer than normal to register those two details and when the realization finally hit him–and it hit him  _ hard _ –he found himself at a loss for words all over again. But it was different this time: his eyes squinted, his brows furrowed, his head tilted to the side in confusion.

What happened then was something he’d never be able to explain, but it was something he had started to learn ever since he was a kid. There was something inside him, some part of his brain that simply  _ saw everything _ . He never paid much attention to it, and it was something that worked without him wanting it to, but whatever it was, was what had allowed him and his brother to survive. It was  _ that _ that had made suspicions arise the night he had killed Dobos and his men and it was  _ that _ that stopped him tonight from messing everything up.

_ Benefit of doubt _ , he repeated himself as he took her in at once.

First, ripped tights and crumpled clothes. Second, those were the same clothes she had been wearing on Tuesday–and he was sure of this because he had memorized every inch of her that day. Third, the limp in her left leg. Fourth, the way she held onto the wall as she walked toward him, always closer and closer, advancing at the same speed of a nightmare. And fifth, droplets of blood trailing down the palm of her hand and onto the fair linoleum of the corridor.

He wished he could say he was quick at reacting, but the truth is, he wasn’t. He was slow and it was like breathing water and the longer he stared at her, the harder his lungs burned.

“What the hell happened?” In his mind, his hand fumbled in his pocket to grab his phone, but the reality of things was, he couldn’t move. He frowned as he stared at her, stared as she moved closer, stared as she fought to keep on clutching on her purse, stared as blood dripped down her hand.

And he listened as she hissed at every step she took, as her breathing broke and cracked each time, at the way she inhaled sharply, right nostril scrunching up in pain in sync with the corner of her lips.

“Hell.” Y/N’s best attempt at joking like she always did fail on a cracked voice and on her stumbling forward.

Slapped awake by his subconscious’ eye, Vladimir was quicker at reaching forward that time. He wrapped his hands around her arms, took a step forward and planted a leg right in front of her to prevent her from slumping. And while the operation lasted only a couple of seconds, he distinctly heard her hiss, whimper and hold her breath all at the same time.

 

*

 

_ Tuesday _ .

There probably had never been such silence at  _ Veles Taxi _ , at least not after Y/N had joined the business. It was almost as though the men present at the garage–some of them working on the cars, others taking a cigarette break–were holding their breath and straining their ears to make sure the lack of the usual screaming and yelling was indeed true. They stood still, some of them staring at the ceiling, almost wishing they could see through the walls to see what was going on in Vladimir’s office, while others looked at each other with frowns on their faces.

And if Anatoly could have snapped a picture to make sure he wasn’t tripping, he still wouldn’t have believed that image.

The surreal silence and attention of those men were unknown to both Vladimir and Y/N. Sitting in his office, they both worked away on their respective computers to make sure everything was working alright–the work at the garage, Sergei’s accountability, the preparation for the more illegal tasks the Ranskahovs’ job required…

And while she managed to focus without distraction, the same couldn’t be said about Vladimir. Eyes fixed on the screen of his old laptop, he couldn’t seem to be able to read what was on the page. His right leg was bouncing up and down under the desk, muscles taut and hard, his left hand was fidgeting with a pencil, and he focused on not splitting his teeth with how hard he was clenching his jaw.

He loved legs and that was a motherfucking fact. He loved to slide his hands over them, loved to grab women’s thighs, loved to kiss and bite the flesh of said thighs. He loved to have women’s thighs wrapped around his head, and heck, had Tanya known how to use hers to her advantage! They got him hard in a matter of minutes–they always had and they probably always would. They were the last thing he noticed in a woman, but the first detail he thought of once he got a chance to admire them. And he had already seen Y/N’s legs at the meeting with Wesley first and at the club later, but now that her tights were of a nude color…

_ God, have mercy _ .

Sitting on the couch, she had her legs stretched out on the chair she had positioned before her seat. The grey pencil skirt had ridden up her thighs, under her laptop, and he could see the faint scar she had on the side of her right thigh. He knew he shouldn’t have left his eyes wander because even now that he was staring at anything but her, all he could see was the skin of her thighs, how her legs proceeded down to her knees and then beyond, down her shins and her crossed ankles.

She was barefoot, jet black heels abandoned in front of the couch when she had made herself at home on the same piece of furniture he had slept on many a time. He knew, then and there, that he would never be able to get a good rest there, not after the picture of her sat like that had engraved itself into his mind.

God, he loved legs. And what surprised him even more was that he loved  _ her _ legs.

He wasn’t sure whether she knew about his addiction or what, because it almost felt like she was using it against him, but he still liked her more for her decision to wear a skirt that day. He now started to understand why the weasel had often wanted her to leave her legs bare…

“I was thinking of moving the location of the meeting with the Italians,” she suddenly said and it took his brain a few more seconds than normal to register her voice. “The warehouse you usually meet at is too close to their headquarters than I like.”

Vladimir hummed. “ _ Da _ ,” but he wasn’t listening. He heard her speak, but his brain couldn’t give a form to the words she spoke as his eyes snapped up to focus on her legs once again.

Had he been looking at her face, he would have noticed her amused smirk. “‘ _ Da _ ’?” she repeated.

A nod of his head. “ _ Da _ .” To what he was consenting, he truly didn’t know.

“Let me suck your dick?” she teased, making herself more comfortable against the back of the couch.

He hummed.

“Gift me ten grand?”

“ _ Da _ .”

She chuckled. “Wow, I’m keeping you accountable on that!”

Her exclamation snapped him out of his trance and his eyes moved up to meet her gaze, slowly bringing her back into focus. “What?”

Y/N laughed. “Were you even listening to me? You have consented on changing the location to meet the Italians,” she held up a finger, “to let me suck you off,” she held up a second finger, “and to give me ten thousand dollars,” a third finger. “You’re proving to be the best boss ever today, Vladimir. I might actually consider developing feelings for you, most of all if you give me all that money out of your own free will.”

He grimaced, even though he couldn’t deny the tug he felt in his already hard penis. “You can choose where to meet the Italians and I might consider letting you choke on my dick, but forget about the money.”

“Stingy,” she complained, drawling out the word, voice and eyes playful as she pulled her laptop closer to her, moving the skirt further up her thighs.

It was probably the most civil interaction they had ever had since their first meeting. The chat they had had on the weekend had definitely changed how things worked between them, considering how he could use her father against her and how she could use Tatyana against him. But while things had been fairly normal on Monday, they now seemed lighter today.

She had seen him staring, though, and, in the spur of the moment, decided to tease him some more. Planting the soles of her feet on the seat of the chair, she bent her legs to the knees and never lost sight of where his attention was. She saw him swallow hard and heard the bouncing of his foot increase its rhythm.

She had accidentally found out how entertaining it was to tease Vladimir and she was now willing to do anything in her power to keep that game up and going. And even if the truth was that she hadn’t expected him to be so easily played by a woman–and even more so now that she knew about the one and only love of his life and what had happened between the two of them–, she felt like she should have expected it. Tough exterior and even tougher interior, she had always been sure he had some sweet and weak spot she could use to make him stop being an ass, but him enjoying the sight of bare legs was beyond her.

“Vova?” It was the first time she used that nickname to call him and truth be told, she didn’t exactly know why she had decided to catch his attention with such a name. It had been on the tip of her tongue before she could stop it and it had forced a shiver down her spine when she realized what could very well have been a mistake on her part.

But Vladimir didn’t yell at nor curse her. He lifted his gaze to meet hers once again, sighing when he realized what he had been staring at for the umpteenth time, and let out a groan. “What?”

She had been planning on calling him out on what could have very well been a kink of his, but chose to not bring it up. It was something that could endanger the truce they were trying to build and she wasn’t willing to risk such a huge step back in their working relationship. “You’re cute.”

“ _ Shto _ ?” He almost jumped up to his feet at her words, but had been too shocked to even move as his foot stopped its bouncing and the pencil fell from his hand. He knew his ears had just turned beetroot red, for he felt them boiling hot.

She shrugged, focus returning on the screen of her laptop. She typed for a while, updating the document she kept on the Ranskahovs’ money movements for what concerned the garage, and then smiled, meeting his gaze again. “You’re cute when you stare off into the distance like that.”

It shook him to the core.

 

*

 

_ Wednesday _ .

It took Y/N long minutes to realize where she was when she woke up the following day. For strenuous moments, she struggled to remember what had happened the day prior, for there was an insisting pounding in her head.

She had gone to work at the garage like usual, she had joked around with Piotr, even accepted his invitation to the movies on Thursday night, and she had then walked up the stairs to Vladimir’s office. She had waited for him in the corridor, respecting his boundaries and the fact that he didn’t want her alone among his things. There was the blurry memory of her calling him ‘cute’–what an idiot, he was surely mad and pissed at her now and she had burned her chances at being on friendly terms with him–and the even blurrier picture of Anatoly slowly opening the door to his brother’s office with the most worried expressions on his face she had ever seen. He had stared at Vladimir and had then followed his gaze, meeting Y/N’s on the couch; he had greeted her and she had whispered a flirtatious greeting his way to joke a little.

But it was hard to focus. That stubborn headache was plaguing her like a nightmare and it got even stronger when she put the ceiling of Wesley’s bedroom into focus. She shot up, sitting on the lusciously soft mattress she had found herself naked in the past, and her hands came up to her face to shield her eyes from the blinding light of the day.

She didn’t know how she had got there, just that…

She hissed, long and low, as she remembered James calling her to meet him for a drink, the frightening insistence in his voice forcing her to accept.

“Morning, Sleeping Beauty.” James Wesley was standing in the doorframe of the huge en-suite bathroom his apartment was provided with, only a white towel to cover his most private parts as he dripped water onto the white marble of the floor.

Her eyes automatically scanned down her body, part of her too terrified at the thought of finding herself just as naked, and they widened in horror when all they met was the lace of her bra. She hastily covered herself with Wesley’s ivory-colored blankets before she dragged them with her as she moved out of the bed. “What the fuck?” Her voice came out in a screech before she peeked underneath the silky covers to check if she had her panties on–she did. It was a relief, for, knowing James, she would have expected just the opposite.

He chuckled, staring at her for a long minute before tugging the towel away from his hips to dry himself. “Don’t be a prude, it’s nothing you haven’t already seen,” he mocked her when she swiftly turned her face to stare out of the window and avoid seeing him.

“You’re a dick,” she muttered, embarrassment too strong to let her be her usual feisty self. “Whatever happened-”

“Nothing’s happened, don’t fret,” he sighed.

Y/N turned in bewildered shock to look at him, but all she was met with was his wide back and toned ass as he rummaged through a drawer of his chest to look for God knew what. She snapped her attention back to the skyline outside the window and balled up her fists.

“I would never fuck scum,” he continued.

“ _ Excuse me _ ?”

“I said, I do not fuck garbage.”

“I wasn’t garbage last time you groaned my name as you came in my ass,” she spat, letting the blanket fall. She stopped herself from striding to the other side of the bedroom to slap him purple, and instead focused on frantically looking for her clothes. She was most likely late for work and she didn’t want to piss Vladimir off, not after the moment they had shared on Sunday afternoon.

He scoffed, turning his head enough to stare at her from the corner of his eye before he bent to put on his socks. She considered jumping on him and choking him, but then realized she stood no chance in a hand-to-hand fight against him, so she simply slumped on the bed when she didn’t see the slightest trace of her shirt or skirt anywhere. “See, some people are shit and others, like me,” and he took a dramatic pause, one he used to fully turn and set his gaze on her, “are  _ not _ . Vladimir Ranskahov, just to make an example, is a smelly pile of shit. He stinks more than his brother and more than the Asians I have to work with. Shit contaminates what it gets in touch with. You following me?”

She wasn’t sure he was truly expecting an answer, so she kept quiet and only reluctantly nodded when he asked her again, fully aware that she was  _ not _ following the line of his thoughts.

“Good.” He smiled and crossed the room to pick up his expensive blankets from the floor. He carefully let them fall onto the bed in a messy heap before he knelt in front of her. “Now, I know– _ I just know _ –what happened between you and that…  _ parasite _ .”

She frowned. She should have been one of the two subjects of what James knew, but she was lost, for nothing had happened with Vladimir. Just threats, fights, and an open-hearted conversation in the haunting tranquillity of her living room. “Sex?”

He slapped her then, and the  _ smack!  _ that accompanied the meeting between the palm of his hand and the skin of her cheek sounded almost comical in the otherwise silence of the room. Wesley grunted, grabbing her chin with a hand and examining the throbbing left side of her face. “I apologize, I didn’t mean to be violent.”

The shock that flashed in her eyes at his unexpected honesty was only mirrored by the shock on his face at the realization that he had, in fact, hurt a woman.

“Yes,  _ sex _ .” He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, fingertips pressing harder into her skin before he let her go. “You are…  _ spoiled _ , now.”

Good thing he didn’t know of the fleeting affair she had had in Ukraine with one of Usyk’s men, then. She considered telling him as much with a smirk on her face but resolved on biting her tongue not to endanger her situation even more. “Why am I half-naked, then?” she asked instead.

He frowned in confusion before he hit her again on the other cheek. “Fuck!” He stood up abruptly and crossed the room again, throwing one door of his closet open as he muttered another apology.

It took him a long time to calm down and Y/N used those endless minutes to consider the probabilities of success in an escape. She’d have to sprint out of the room and down the corridor, dash through the open-space that were the living room and the kitchen, but then she’d have to quickly punch in a code she didn’t know in the security panel just next to the door and he’d have her.

“There was no need to sleep in uncomfortable clothes,” Wesley eventually said, startling her out of her thoughts. “So I took the liberty of taking them off. I didn’t touch you, though. As I said, I like to stay  _ clean _ .” He never looked at her once as he wore one of his expensive suits, secured his Patek Philippe around his wrist and took his glasses from his bedside table. “ _ I _ am not the one who’s going to touch you, anyway. I have other people to do that for me: you know I don’t like how blood stains my hands.”

 

*

 

_ Thursday _ .

The first thing Y/N was aware of, was the dooming sense of  _ déjà-vu _ that hit her like Wesley’s slap the day prior. Today, though, remembering wasn’t as hard: she could still feel the soft touch of James’ bed sheets against her skin if she focused enough, just as she could feel the rough hands of his men on her.

She was still handcuffed to the chair they had tied her to and even more than the pulsing pain of their hits on her body, she could feel its stiffness as her limbs slowly tried to recover from the uncomfortable position she had slept in. The cold metal of the handcuffs seemed to bite into the skin of her wrists and for the first time ever, she found herself wishing to see his stupid face.

There was stupidity and then there was trick-Wesley stupidity. She hadn’t been doing what she had been hired for and she was now paying the price. Not that she hadn’t been expecting some sort of punishment, but this went even beyond James. And even worse, she had nothing to say: she had nothing to defend herself and she had close to nothing about the Ranskahovs to sell.

Tatyana was dead and she’d be no use to someone like James Wesley–nor to someone like Fisk, even though she had started to think that collecting information about the Russians as an insider had been Wesley’s idea. Not that he could blame him–she probably would have done the same had the roles been inverted–, but still, she wasn’t sure Fisk had any saying in this matter.

“You done keeping your mouth shut, sunshine?”

She didn’t know those men. She knew they were Wesley’s bootlickers, but she didn’t know their names, she had never seen their faces, and therefore, she didn’t have anything she could use against them–family, kids, diseases…

“What do you want me to say?” she groaned.

Her throat almost closed up when the man forced her to take a sip of water from the plastic bottle that had sat on the table she had been sitting in front of all night. “Anything you know about the Russians.”

“I don’t know anything.”

Stubbornness wasn’t the right way to go, she knew it, but there was no way she was going to open her mouth. As she had confessed to Vladimir, she didn’t exactly know why: they weren’t friends, they barely were coworkers–she was hoping that would change, though, considering the change in their behavior with each other. The Ranskahovs and the Russians hadn’t saved her life, they hadn’t given her money, they hadn’t done anything special to gain her silence. And yet, here she was.

“That’s not the truth and you know it.” Scarred face and tattooed neck, it was the same man who had gently questioned her the day before, before Wesley got tired of her stubborn silence and decided to change strategy. “But I’m still going to pull it out of you.”

 

*

 

_ Friday _ .

Friday was her lucky day, for Fisk got word of James Wesley’s treatment towards his precious hacker. He personally went up to his assistant’s penthouse, pushed the door open when Wesley opened it and then closed it behind his back without saying a word. But words or not, his eyes were the greatest representation of fury.

As big as a mountain, he had tended to her bruises–much to her surprise–and had taken care of the few scratches she had on her arms. He bandaged her wrists, where the skin had been torn by the ropes that had been used to restrict her. He had accompanied her into Wesley’s en-suite bathroom and had helped her get dressed in the same clothes she hadn’t managed to find on Wednesday morning.

Then, he had marched down the hallway to face his main man in the living room.

She heard Fisk’s angered voice grow louder and louder and Wesley’s futile attempts to justify that mistreatment.

The thought of Vladimir came up again when she peeked at her reflection in the mirror. She wondered what he might be thinking about, whether her disappearance was going to make things even worse than before between them, and whether such change would reflect on the relationships she had with Anatoly, Seriozha, Petya and the others.

Then, she thought back to her father, to how he must have felt when the charter he had entered had risen up against him. Much like him, she had brought this onto herself. She had chosen this path for her life when the time had come to take a decision and she had decided to play with fire, ignoring every single ringing bell and warning sign.

Fisk in person left her a block from her apartment complex, then. Time was blurred after the sleepless night she had, and things kept on flowing into one another. Had it been hours since her employer had arrived at Wesley’s apartment or a few minutes, she would never know.

The only thing she knew was that she fell on the slippery pavement–she hadn’t even known it had rained–and that the palm of the hand she had used to take the fall had ended up being scratched and bleeding. And when she eventually made her way into the elevator and then out into the corridor of her floor, the last thing she would have expected was to find Vladimir Ranskahov waiting for her outside the door of her apartment and for him to drag her into his.


	11. Toska

The air in Vladimir’s apartment felt more sacred than that of a church. Or of a graveyard. In its solemnity, Y/N couldn’t help but think that the reason behind such a deafening silence had to be Vladimir’s wish to keep anything and anyone out of his house. And as long as no one disturbed the peace of that place, then he could pretend that that night didn’t happen.

He never spoke once–not after catching her in the corridor, where she had almost fallen to her knees, weakened by the not-so-pleasant vacation in Wesley’s loving care, and not as he cleaned the scratches left on the palm of her hand by the rough pavement in front of their apartment complex.

The only audible sounds, apart from Vladimir’s heavy breathing, were her occasional whimpers and gasps as he dabbed a gauze on the wounded skin of her hands. Those same sounds almost felt like screams in the death-silence of the room.

They had never been this close to each other. They had surely been at each other’s throat in his office on more occasions than they could count, this was no secret, and they had been shoulder-to-shoulder on her couch on Sunday afternoon. But it had never felt this peaceful, this… placid, in the tranquillity of his bare apartment.

It was like being hidden away from the world, nuzzled up in a smoky cocoon. She doubted the walls had been soundproofed, but the thought couldn’t but pop up in her mind at the lack of external sounds. The buzzing late-night traffic of the city didn’t seem to reach their floor and it was almost as though he didn’t have neighbors, for no sound could be perceived from beyond the walls. It was cozy, _everything_ was–his leather couch, the soft pillow he had placed behind her back, even his touch–soft and caring and almost surreal when she thought about who the man kneeling in front of her was.

It was almost _intimate_.

She gasped loudly at that sudden thought and the sound seemed to snap Vladimir out of his silent trance.

“ _Izvini_ ,” he muttered, still absorbed too deeply in his own mind to realize he had gone back to some old Russian memory.

It took her minutes to realize the meaning of his words, for she, too, was too lost in her own thoughts. She had spent the last few days hoping and _praying_ that Vladimir Ranskahov–surely not her sworn nemesis, but not even her best friend–would materialize out of thin air to take her out of James’ claws. To no avail, of course–there was no such thing as magic, at least not of the truly useful kind. But the image of his scarred face had never left her mind and-

Her eyes snapped a couple of times between his tattooed fingers, holding her hand with so much unexpected care she herself thought she might break under even a slightly bolder touch, and the focused frown on his face.

Had he just apologized?

It couldn’t be. This was Vladimir Ranskahow she was thinking about– _it couldn’t be_.

She shook her head, grimacing when her headache made her temples pulse. She could be called anything but not delusional. And yet, that was the meaning of that word– _I am sorry_.

Had she not been so focused on her own sense of hearing, she would have dismissed it on her distracting memories. And while a part of her almost pushed her to ask him to repeat himself, she found herself biting her tongue, unable–or unwilling–to open her mouth.

For a brief moment, she even considered saying something–thanking him or simply telling him it wasn’t his fault. The truth was, in fact, his touch was so light she could barely feel it above the pulsating dull pain reminding her of how many muscles and bones the human body has.

The unexpected thing was, though, she found herself mirroring his apology out loud. She didn’t look at him as she said those words. Instead, she kept her eyes trained on the huge flat screen of the TV in front of her.

She thought–almost _wished_ –he hadn’t heard her, for he continued in his meticulous attempt of cleaning even the smallest particle of dirt out of the scratches in her palms.

He only spoke after he had finished wrapping her trembling hands in white bandages. “What happened?”

It wasn’t the angry ‘where the fuck have you been?’ she had expected–he didn’t trust her, he didn’t exactly deem her trustworthy. Instead, it was a tired ‘what happened?’ that left her speechless for a minute or two as she watched him get up to throw away the dirty gauzes.

She used that time to collect her thoughts, to try and rationalize why, exactly, she hadn’t said a word to Wesley–why she cared so much about some criminals that would sell her in case of necessity. She also considered lying, saying something just to give him an answer without actually answering him–she didn’t owe him anything, after all. Yet, it was also something she couldn’t bring herself to do. For as much as she liked working solo, she needed someone to have her back and while Vladimir Ranskahov wouldn’t exactly have been her first choice just a couple of months ago, she found herself being drawn to him in a way she hadn’t expected–in a way she _couldn’t explain_.

“Wesley,” she muttered, voice mechanical as she tasted the fading metallic taste of blood on her tongue.

The irrational choice of trusting him had probably fallen on Vladimir because she knew he could kill just as she knew he could do more than that. And he was smart, cunning, even if prey of his many anger outbursts at time. He had sensed something was wrong with the Hungarians before anyone else and that presentiment must have come from somewhere–some careful ability he had been forced to develop in all his years as a criminal and even before that, in the time he had lived with his abusive father.

If she could trust him, she… There probably wasn’t an ending to that thought, at least not now that she couldn’t seem to be able to focus on one thing at a time.

“He wanted me to tell him what I know about you.”

She didn’t turn to look at him, focused as she was on the shadow of her reflection on the screen of the television.

Such a huge thing, she thought, in such an empty house. It almost felt out of place in that living room with just a couch and a bare coffee table with the surface of thin glass. The elephant in the room.

“You said nothing.” It wasn’t a question, he knew she hadn’t opened her mouth or else, Wesley wouldn’t have done this to her.

He was standing right next to her, staring down at her unfocused face, she could feel it. She could feel it but she couldn’t turn, couldn’t look at him.

The TV wasn’t the elephant in the room, she almost chuckled. _She_ was–or _Vladimir_ was. It was difficult to choose an answer when both of them felt out of place–her in his house and he…

“No.” She shook her head, eyes never leaving the black mirror in front of her. What did he watch on it when he was alone? “I told you, you can trust me.”

Vladimir sighed. It was long and deep, a tired sound that seemed to fade in her mind. “What happened?” he asked again, moving to sit down on the couch next to her.

And she told him everything.

 

*

 

Vladimir jolted awake in the middle of the night, at two, probably three in the morning, covered in sweat, his breathing still ragged and wild, his hands still wrapped into fists, nails too short to cut into the hardened skin of his palms. It took him a while to realize he had shot up into a sitting position and a little longer to see the blankets bunched up at the foot of his bed, a minute longer to come to the conclusion that he was still in his house, still in his bedroom.

Just a nightmare. Just…

 _Just Utkin._ There was no running away from that name, not even when he had managed to put years between _it_ and his escape. Trying to avoid its daunting presence in his mind was no good–just as no good could come out of it. That place was so ingrained in his mind that it was all he saw when he closed his eyes, all he dreamed of on the many nights he was cursed to dream.

The eerie silence of the bedroom didn’t ease the tension in his muscles, nor did it even out the scorching rhythm of his breathing. It only put him on edge, one foot here and the other back in Russia, in a dark cell whose damp walls he could still feel closing in on him, cutting his breath even shorter, pushing his mind into override as his whole body tensed to lunge forward, almost wanting to jump out of his skin.

It was like being trapped in that elevator all over again, with the only difference that he wasn’t six and he had no father that could punish him for it anymore.

“Snap out of it.” His sore voice scared him, it pushed him to look around the room to find out who that other man was.

There was no other man, of course, just the echoes of the past, back to haunt him yet again.

“You were screaming.”

That voice was definitely not his and when his eyes snapped up in its direction, the only thing he managed to feel for an endless minute was a never-ending wave of fear wash over him.

“Are you okay?” Y/N asked.

He had managed to convince her to change into the clothes he had brought back from her apartment, after all, he thought as he took her in, dressed in gray pajamas as she stood in the corridor. Its bright lights were blinding him.

“You should be resting.” He wanted to groan and more than that, he wanted her out of his house–out of his _cell_ –but there was no way he was going to leave her alone after what had happened. There was no conscious reason behind his stubbornness on the matter, just that…

“You were screaming,” she repeated, taking a step forward to stand in the frame of the door.

 _Please, don’t come in_.

There was more rationality in the irrationality of his thought than he would ever know. Her presence inside those walls was already too much, it short-circuited his mind and his body, sending them both into a frenzy. But if she entered his room, he… He knew nothing would ever really happen, part of him truly knew, but that was still his safe space–more than the living room, more than the kitchen filled with knives hidden in strategic places, more than the secure confinements of his bathtub. To have someone break the spell and cross its border…

Tanya had done just that, back in Russia, back when it wasn’t that hard for him to trust people. And while Tanya was now dead–while _he_ had been the one to murder her–, he wasn’t willing to take the risk.

“Don’t step forward,” he found himself panting, fighting to regain control of his body and of his mind as his sight seemed to lose its focus. She might have kept her mouth shut, might have kept his secrets, but he was still Vladimir Ranskahov and he didn’t want anyone to see him like that.

She stood still and had her face not been hidden by the shadows of the night in his bedroom, he would have noticed her frown.

“I’m fine.”

His own breathing was deafening him, the raging movements of his lungs and ribcage numbed his other senses as his head seemed to spin.

 _I’m fine_.

It was a recurring lie, one he couldn’t stop telling himself. Because, after all, how else could he feel? Tolik was fine, everyone at the garage was fine, so why couldn’t he? If he pretended hard enough, if he convinced himself that everything was alright, then maybe things would start going the right way.

“I’ll be on the couch if you need me.”

He didn’t answer. He simply stared at her without actually seeing her and wondered what had pushed him to let her inside his house. The wounds, the blood, the unexpected vulnerability painted all over her face–those factors were indeed there, he wouldn’t lie, but…

But he had been upset. Upset she might have turned her back against and sold him and the guys at the garage to Fisk and his men. Upset he had started to trust the wrong person, the first one that seemed to matter after years of isolation. Upset he might have failed, falling for the same trick a second time after the disastrous relationship that had gifted him and his brother with a one-way ticket to hell.

And against his better judgment, against what the monsters growling and hiding in the darkness of his minds pushed him to want and need and do, he had been hopeful. The thought–the _hope_ –that something else had happened had been there. Sergei was his best man and he trusted her, so why couldn’t he do the same? He had been thinking about that as he had unlocked the door of his apartment to drag her inside and he had found himself hoping with all he had that she was on his side.

Now, with the blinding darkness of Utkin still blurring his sight, he realized that actually having her on his side scared him even more, for he would have to be on hers as well.

 

*

 

The next morning, the silence was deafening. And awkward.

Y/N and Vladimir sat on opposite sides of the small kitchen table and while they both pretended to be busy with breakfast, none of them could eat. She still had a gnawing feeling in her guts, one that seemed to tell her she had fucked up–and that she had fucked up _badly_ –, while embarrassment and something else, something he couldn’t explain, plagued Vladimir’s thoughts.

It was already hard as it was, to go on when all his mind seemed to be able to do was stay back, bogged down in the quicksands of his past. Utkin, Tatyana, Moscow, the money, the cell, his father, the elevator… Everything still felt so _present_ and _real_ and _appalling_ , almost as though it had only happened yesterday–or a minute ago.

“How did you sleep?” she asked.

He wasn’t good at this, wasn’t good at opening up. Only God knew how much he wanted to tell her–or anyone else, for that matter–how decayed he felt, still drowning in the cold and dark waters of a lake so big he couldn’t leave, couldn’t swim his way to its shores. And only God knew why he could never bring himself to open his mouth, to speak up, to slay his demons the way they were going to slay him sooner or later. _Sooner rather than later_.

But then he looked up at her, met her gaze, the dark circles under her eyes, the slight tremor in her hands, how small she looked in his kitchen, and for a moment he felt at peace. This wasn’t Utkin–nor one of the many cells he had been locked up in. And this wasn’t Tatyana, ready to sell him, nor was this his father, eager to beat him up yet again.

“I didn’t,” he ended up confessing, voice flat and emotionless. If he only managed to forget about his rules for one day–one _hour_ –then maybe things would be easier. He’d tell her how badly decades of unshed tears stung his eyes, how closed-up his throat felt as he choked on his brother’s life, on his brother’s woman, on his brother’s strength. He’d tell her how lonely he felt even among his men, how naked he was in front of his enemies with no one and nothing to call his own. And he’d tell her how much he admired her, how sorry he was for how he’d been treating her, and that it wasn’t her fault–it was _his_. But as he looked at her, so fragile and already shattered, all he could do was swallow the lump in his throat and clear his voice. “You?”

“I didn’t either.” Her smile was tired, strained, so thin it felt like a raging scream in the blankness of her face. A wiped-clean canvas someone had previously painted.

She seemed to be on the verge of saying something, of releasing the torrent of thoughts she had always kept hidden inside her, all the emotions and feelings and pain and happiness and terror. How alone she had felt when the Barbarians had turned their back to her and her family, how dusty she had felt when her father had been killed, how joyful she had been the first time she had seen the lights of New York City at night. How blissfully naive she had been, thinking she could fool lions when she wasn’t but a flea under their paws.

How scary it was, to fall apart under Wesley’s hands and to get back together in Vladimir’s.

How painfully faraway she felt with him so close–so close she could touch him, so close she could hold him through the horrors of the night.

But she voiced none of that–couldn’t find the courage to, the strength. “Thank you,” she said instead, voice feeble but grateful. “I don’t think I would have managed to be alone tonight.”

 _I know what loneliness does to a person_ , he wanted to tell her. He knew it all too well, locked-up as he was in his half-willing, half-forced isolation. It turned you into something else, pressed you into a crystal–beautiful and valuable and at the same time, sterile, cold, so worn-out by what’s inside you that you turn transparent. And you cannot break–you _don’t want_ to break in fear of what’s inside–and of what’s _outside_. You live in your shell for so long that you forget what the world is like, what people are like, how deeply moving and _human_ it feels to be touched and loved and held.

“I called Tolya.”

They had somehow managed to finish their breakfast a while ago, forced cold eggs and even colder coffee down their throats, and the plates and mugs had been put away to dry.

The elephant had yet to leave the room.

“You will be staying with him and Paulina until I fix this.”

 _Until_ I _fix this_.

She looked at him, standing in the doorframe of the kitchen as she stood near the couch in the living room. Universes apart. And even worse than that, _universes that were universes apart_. “I don’t want to stay with him.” Her brows furrowed, her heart sank deep into her belly.

 _I want to stay with_ you _._

She hadn’t prayed for Anatoly to come and rescue her–she had prayed for Vladimir. In his ruthlessness, in his blood-thirst, his anger, his unbreakable fragility–or his fragile façade of stone–, she knew she could trust him, she could… put her life in his hands.

But she couldn’t say those words. Couldn’t say to the nightmare that she wanted to revel in its darkness a little longer, that the light scared her to the bone.

“We are neighbors, we are…” she tried to reason, the silence of the room screaming in her ears, pounding on her eardrums, seeping into her bones until they brittled. “Friends.”

“Friends,” he repeated, fists clenching and unclenching at his sides.

No, they weren’t.

But God, damn, did he want that. _Needed_ that. Needed to close the shutters of his mind to step into the world for an hour–a minute.

“I protect my friends,” he stated. “Is safe, with Tolya.”

“But I trust _you_.” It cost her all she had, to say those words. To admit such a secret out loud–and to the last person she should be confessing it to. It was scary, to trust him. To realize that such a thought wasn’t a thought, that it was something more, something she couldn’t explain nor rationalize. To look at herself in the mirror and say: “ _I trust the criminal_.”

Vladimir looked taken aback–and the surprised expression on his face didn’t go unnoticed. Even after all the things he had said to her, the insults and the furious tantrums, she was still standing with her back facing him, sure that he wouldn’t stab it. “You shouldn’t.”

“I’ve spent my whole life refraining myself from trusting people, stupidly thinking that I could survive on my own, turning myself into the mole my father failed to be. Life doesn’t work like that, though.” She grimaced at the memory and looked down to the ground for a second before lifting her head to stare at him again. “It almost feels like months have passed, ever since _he_ dragged me along to meet you and your brother. And in the time I spent with you, after all the fights we’ve had, the strong words, the suspicions, the insults… You showed me your true face and I trust no mask.”

He stared at her and it was suddenly hard to breathe. He had spent so much time trying to push her away and out of his cage that he had ended up blinding himself. And as the demons’ claws seemed to maul him from the inside, the realization that she would stay hit him like a bucket of ice-cold water.

“You don’t have to trust me back. I just… I don’t know who the real Anatoly is and not even who the real Paulina is. And until I figure it out, I’m not…”

 _Leaving you. I am not leaving you_.

She didn’t say those words, couldn’t bring herself to, but it didn’t matter, for he still understood.

And while part of him was crying and sobbing, thrashing in his mind, begging him to kick her out of the safe confinements of his apartment, all he could do was take a step forward. And then another. And another. His hand trembled on her shoulder when he touched her.

God, he needed a cigarette.

And a drink.

“I want to trust you,” he admitted, staring beyond her for he couldn’t– _he couldn’t_ –look at her in the eye and show her how vulnerable he was–how _fragile_ , like a ticking bomb ready to go off at the slightest movement. “I do, but I…”

“I know.”

She didn’t move. Didn’t step back. Didn’t push his hand away. She couldn’t, not when his warmth proved her stupid thoughts wrong, for he _was_ alive. His warmth felt as thick as honey as it seeped through her skin, spread up her neck and down her arm, burning the feeling of Wesley’s apartment away.

It was like coming back to life, like walking out of the darkness of the night and into the bright light of day. Stupid, for Vladimir wasn’t light. But true. And as she stood there, bare and vulnerable, she knew she’d do whatever he asked her to. And it wasn’t important, whether he trusted her or not–whether he _said_ so with real words, whether he _knew_ it in the first place–, because she knew he’d have her back.

“Am taking you somewhere tonight.” He looked at her when he spoke and she could see, in his unfocused gaze, the internal struggle he was going through. “After that you decide if you still trust me.”

 


	12. The Price of Courage

 

Despite being relatively big and empty, the underground garage was packed in its middle. Unused and abandoned by the city of New York, it had been seized by the metropolis’ fighting underworld and turned into one of the many scenes of the itinerant circus of impromptu hand-to-hand combats long before Vladimir had come to America.

Places like that were home for him, but for Y/N? Not so much. She had definitely witnessed something like that in Ukraine during her internship  – or at least that was how her resume described the months she had spent there –, but it had never been an entertainment kind of thing. They had been punitive fights and to think that these people were fighting for the love of it…

She wasn’t scared. The curious glances she earned didn’t even manage to touch her, for she knew – somehow – that Vlad would keep her safe. The trust she had in him was most likely more than it should have been, but she didn’t want to think that she was alone in all this, so she kept on hoping – hoping he’d keep her safe from these people cheering on the two men fighting in the center of the room and hoping he’d keep her safe from Wesley and her duties towards him.

On his part, Vladimir was more nervous than he let on. It was an art he had managed to learn in all the years he had spent in this business – and in the many that had preceded it when home had felt just like another cage in the zoo that was his life. To show her, of all people, this side of him… 

It was scary, it made him feel small and insignificant and utterly exposed. This wasn’t Tolya, and it wasn’t Sergei, either. It was someone he didn’t completely know, someone he didn’t completely _trust_ despite all his best attempts. It was also someone that had proven to him that she could be trusted, someone that had proven to him – probably poisoned by the fumes of her own fear, back there in Wesley’s apartment – that she was ready to be beaten to a pulp to shield his secrets.

That was probably what scared him the most. Tanya had been just like that, in the beginning, before things started to go to shit under his nose without him even realizing so. She had loved him and cared for him and treasured his secrets like they had been her own and then, when he least expected it, she had stabbed his back. She had stabbed his back and his love for her had been the one to twist the knife in the wound.

He didn’t want history to repeat itself. He didn’t want nor need another Tatyana in his life and he only wished he were brave enough to tell her because to tell her would mean to acknowledge and give body to the one and only realization haunting his every day: he had started to fall for her.

He didn’t know what it was that he liked in her, for he was still trying to convince himself that he did _not_ like her – he didn’t like her job, nor her employers, nor her past, nor the secrets she had kept from him. But he liked her wits, he loved the fact that she kept her head high and confronted him like she wasn’t afraid of him. He was in love with her legs, sure, but he also admired her strength and the attention to the details she put in what she did.

Tanya hadn’t been like that, and to notice such difference was a relief. Tanya had been a good-hearted person – or as much of a good-hearted person as a backstabbing bitch could be. She had wanted to help people and she had studied to do just that, to reach a position of somewhat power and do a difference in the world. Vladimir had never understood what she had found in him – an orphan, a _criminal_ , in and out of jail, with his hands always bloodied and his wallet always full. He hadn’t even been good with people – and not always a gentleman with her – he hadn’t exactly had the best of upbringings.

Y/N was different, the face on the other side of the coin. She was stubborn and skeptical, more similar to him than his own brother ever was. She had grown up surrounded by crime, she had made her bones on murder and theft and lies and had ended up picking up demons on her way to the present day. Almost more importantly, she was someone he could _understand_ – it had never been like that with Tanya, not even once: he had never understood her need to do good, to always do better than the day before, to elevate herself from the hole he had been digging since the day he was born.

Even now, as he looked at Y/N from the corner of his eye, he couldn’t help but point out the differences, caving in under the weight of what he needed in life – someone to trust and that could be trusted, someone that could protect him the way he would protect her. She held her head high – despite the bruises, despite the pain, she held her head high and there was a defiant look in her eyes, a defiant stance in her shoulders. She was more similar to him than he’d ever be comfortable to admit: she took her weaknesses and she buried them deep behind the mask she wore when she left the safety of her house, the only place the world wasn’t allowed to enter, not until she decided to open the door.

And suddenly, the fear of being judged left him. It evaporated from his shoulders and from his eyes and left him even more naked than he had felt before. She probably didn’t see it, but he knew she understood it deep down inside – and if not now, then definitely one day.

This was his way to feel normal, to feel _alive_. The fights had become his life long before he had tried to make himself one. Under an opponent’s punches, with bones cracking and blood staining his teeth, he went back to feeling alive. There was no more Utkin, no more escaping to America, no more fighting to reach the top in an underworld society that could dethrone him the day after. It was just him and the man in front of him, his skin and muscles and bones under his fists as he did the only thing he knew how to.

There was some desperate part of him, a nameless one that never fought harder than his demons, that wanted her to _see_. See his pain and his struggles, the shadows inside his head – and outside of it – and _understand_. He didn’t need pity, he didn’t need a shoulder to cry on: all he was hungry for was a person that looked at him and saw what he couldn’t show, heard what he couldn’t say, feel what he didn’t want to bring himself to feel. And whether Y/N was the right person or not, he didn’t know yet.

And it scared him.

It scared him more than falling for a woman that wanted to save the world. It scared him even more than the shadows of Utkin ever did – probably more than they ever will. There was an uncanny safety in the dark demons that populated his world: he knew what to expect from them, he had learned their antics and their strategies, he could foresee their next move – it didn’t imply that he was _safe_ from them, on the contrary; it only meant that he knew how to handle them, one way or another.

But Y/N was unreadable. Even with all the similarities they shared, she remained a closed book – a closed cell. She was foggy and mysterious, a demon he didn’t know how to handle yet. He wanted to learn how to, though, wanted to learn _from her_ – every single shattered piece of his mind craved that – the contact, the company – more spiritual rather than physical.

He wanted to look at her and see the world she carried inside, just as he wanted her to look at him and see all his darkness, all his demons, all those ghostly echoes of a still-living and still-thriving past _and find some sort of spark in all that chaos_. If she only looked at him – _looked through him_ – and told him what she found there, what she found where his tired gaze and soul couldn’t reach, then he knew he could start over. Not a new life – he didn’t have enough energies for that –, but just… _something new_. Fewer demons thrashing in his mind, fewer shadows in his bedroom, fewer cigarettes in his life and more love – for his brother, for his men, for the world, maybe even for a woman.

Maybe even for a family.

But as of now, he was stuck in the mud the fighting underworld was.

He wanted to unlearn that – unlearn how to fight, how to survive in a society that only wanted to punch your teeth out, smash your face in, scatter bones and brains and blood around.

He wanted to be like Tolya – loved and with love to give, without the need to bring pain and destruction just to feel the _shadow_ of a spark of life.

“How was it?” he found himself asking instead. “Life with motorcycle club.”

He was leaning against a concrete pillar, a smoking cigarette hanging from his lips as the tip of his index finger danced along the unnaturally cold grip of his gun.

Y/N was standing right next to him – stiffly, almost as though she wanted to become a statue, a _pillar_ herself. She was staring at the fight taking place a few meters from her, probably processing that new level of fucked-up Vladimir had reached. But the frown on her face softened into a half-smile when she turned to look at him and for a moment, her eyes closed and she looked younger than she actually was.

“It was… nice.” She leaned against the pillar he had claimed as his, and her shoulder pressed into his as she extended an arm to take the cigarette from his lips.

Vladimir had never seen her smoke, had never smelled the stench of cigarettes on her clothes. For some weird reason, though, it didn’t surprise him and all he managed to do was look as she took a drag just to then puff out the smoke.

“It was more than nice. It was like… like a party.” She shrugged her shoulders before handing him back the cig. “It probably had more lows than highs,” she chuckled, tongue coming out to lick along her lower lip, “but I was a kid and my daddy and his friends had cool motorbikes and that was all that mattered. I probably spent more time riding bitch behind my father than I did doing my homework.”

“I didn’t peg you for someone who didn’t care about school.”

His comment made her laugh. “Oh, I did. I studied with the other members’ kids. We helped each other with homework, came up with strategies to cheat on the next test… But we were kids living half in this world and half in something else, something we couldn’t even come to comprehend in the slightest. Our fathers were feared and had enemies, they worked two jobs and flirted with jail and the police. It was exhilarating.” She shook her head, lost in thought, and when she turned to look at him again, she didn’t really see him, lost somewhere down memory lane. “You have your fights,” she continued, gesturing vaguely to the garage and the people in it, “and we had… _that_ , whatever that was.”

“Do you miss it?”

“Every day.” Her answer came more quickly than he had thought it would, more quickly than she had ever realized it would betray her like that. “Sometimes,” she added. “Part of me still loves it, still wants to… I don’t know.” His half-smoked cigarette was between her lips once again and all Vladimir could do was stare at the way she smoked as her gaze got lost in the cheering crowd in front of them. “But I also hate it.” She twirled the cigarette between her fingers, stared at the way the ashes danced towards the floor. “Hate that I love it after what it did to us. Hate myself for still flirting with the illegal side of things the same way everybody back there did. But…”

“Is hard to leave when it is all you have ever known.”

Her eyes met his – they _saw_ him this time – and she nodded once. “Yes.”

“Legality is scary,” Vladimir said, more to himself than to her. And it indeed was: it paralyzed him, stuffed his veins with cotton and glass fiber. Before it, he was vulnerable, more vulnerable than he’d ever be with the mouth of a gun kissing his forehead. “It should be easy way, but is not. Illegality is harder but safer.”

Her fingers brushed against the back of his hand and whether that was a voluntary or an accidental touch, he would never know. She didn’t say illegality was easier – she knew the price people had to pay for it, even when they embarked in that life willingly. It was, on varying degrees, a conscious choice that only lead to a marred mind and a tattoo- or scar-kissed body and soul.

“Does not matter how much we want, we can never leave. It always finds way back to us.” He took one last drag from his cigarette before he let it fall to the ground. They both stared at its butt for a moment, silence stretching between them and oddly bringing them closer before he put out the cigarette butt with the ball of his elegant shoe.

 

*

 

They didn’t feel the scorching drag of alcohol down their throats – he of his vodka and she of her sambuca. Stopping by a bar hadn’t been in Vladimir’s plans when he had come up with the idea of taking her to the fights, but it had felt like the perfect continuation for the night: it was the perfect way to drown his sorrows, the only route he ever took, and he was starting to understand that Y/N wasn’t that different.

Shot after shot, the alcohol took away the problems still crawling up their spines and it shed light everywhere around them, shooing the shadows of their minds away. Not enough to get them drunk, though, only tipsy, heads dizzy as their sight lost its focus.

Inhibitions lost between a swig of burning liquor and a drag of the same, shared cigarette, Vladimir found himself with a loose tongue. “I loved her, I really did. Part of me probably still does,” he said, tracing imaginary lines on the bandages wrapping her left hand. “Tatyana,” he added when she hummed questioningly.

She didn’t answer but when he looked up at her, staring at the counter of the bar and at the people standing there, he saw she was holding her breath.

She looked both older and younger at the same time, and the lines of her face were starker under the suffused orange-y lights of the place. Shielded away from prying eyes in the corner booth they had sat in, she felt smaller than she was, swallowed away by her own thoughts.

“She was nice and smart and kindest person I have ever known,” he continued. “Even despite betrayal.”

“Why are you telling me?” She had stopped smoking and the cigarette rested unused between the index and middle fingers of her right hand, the smoke leaving its burning tip in tantalizing patterns.

He didn’t know why he was telling her that, not the full reason, at least. But he wanted to do this right, wanted to risk and open a crack in the armor he wore every day to shield himself from the world. “You remind me of her.”

Y/N kept quiet, even when she met his gaze, even when she dropped it to the shiny surface of the table. “I don’t think we’re that similar. I just… work my way around people, play my cards right.”

She wasn’t moving his hand away – nor hers. She kept it there, immobile on the table, and she let him touch it, let him trace the outline of her fingers as he got lost in his mind.

“You are smart,” he nodded stubbornly, finishing the vodka in his glass. “Am not sure about nice and kind, though.”

The chuckle they shared was bitter and amused at the same time. It seemed to ripple up their throats, moving the usually placid waters of their lives.

“I could say the same about you,” she agreed, turning to look at him again and shaking her head a second after, giggle evolving into a sudden burst of full laughter, one that, despite his better judgment, made him smile. It was only when they grew silent again that she continued, the palm of her hand closing to hold his. “You _are_ kind, in your own way.”

He would have blushed, had he been able to. Instead, his lips broke into a half-smirk as he stared at their entwined fingers. It was an odd feeling, a sensation he hadn’t felt in forever. Her hand in his felt more real than he thought it would – not that he had wondered about holding hands with her, that is. He gently squeezed it experimentally once just to then draw slow circles in the space between her thumb and forefinger.

The urge to lie was there, burning his tongue, setting his nerve endings on fire as he set his jaw. But he _did_ enjoy it – enjoyed that small gesture of friendly whatever-this-is, enjoyed the content silence between them, her perfume mixing with the stench of cigarettes and the alluring smell of demons.

“I will not say I trust you,” he sighed and she turned in her seat to face him, moving her left leg so that her thigh was resting on the leather cushion of the bench, her knee pressing into the side of his leg. “But I do.”

The price of saying those three words out loud was the same as ending up and spending time in Utkin, of escaping Siberia, of killing Tatya in cold blood and somehow, it was even heavier. It mixed with the sadness the death of his mother had left behind, the hopeless hopefulness of his short-lived childhood, with the thrill of the fights, the shattering coughing fit of the first time he stole his father’s vodka with Tolik, and the exhilarating sense of liberation he had got drunk on when his abusive father had left this world.

And it was scary.

As scary as her lips pressing against his stubble-covered jaw felt.


End file.
